How Newsweek Determined the World’s Best Hospitals in 2025

Whether for an emergency or a routine procedure, people want to know they are getting the best care. And that starts with choosing the right hospitals.

Newsweek, in partnership with Statista, has published its World’s Best Hospitals 2025 ranking to highlight the top hospitals from around the world that are providing the highest quality patient care while combating the world’s most pressing medical issues through research and innovation.

When Newsweek published its first list of the top hospitals around the world in 2019, the list had 1,000 hospitals from 11 countries. Six years later, this ranking includes 2,445 hospitals from 30 countries across five continents. Each country was chosen based on several factors, including standard of living and life expectancy, population size, number of hospitals and data availability.

“The global ranking is looking across different health care systems and different scopes of health care and providing some guidance for people who are traveling abroad or looking for hospitals in other places,” Statista’s Lukas Kwietniewski told Newsweek’s Health Care Editor Alexis Kayser. “But [it’s] also for the leading hospitals who are maybe not comparing themselves so much domestically but want to know, against my international competition, where do I stack up?”

As the ranking continues to grow, more hospitals are featured for the first time. This year there were 180 newly recognized hospitals from 24 different countries, according to Statista.

These are the countries included on the World’s Best Hospitals ranking:

• The Americas: The United States of America, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Chile
• Europe: Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway
• Asia: Japan, South Korea, India, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Thailand. Israel, Singapore
• Oceania: Australia

The individual country rankings list the top hospitals, based on available data. The United States has the most hospitals with 430 and Israel and Singapore have the least, with 10 each.

The methodology was established by Statista with the help of a global board of medical experts from the United States, Switzerland, Germany, France and Israel. Hospitals are scored based on peer recommendation, patient experience, hospital quality metrics and Statista’s Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROM) survey, which assesses how hospitals implement patient feedback on their quality of care.

PROMs measure how patients view their health and quality of life based on their illness or condition and the care they receive. This includes the status of a patient’s symptoms, pain, mobility and functionality to monitor progress and improve the quality of care. Hospitals are invited to participate in the PROMs survey, which adds to the total score. Hospitals are not penalized if they don’t, but the Statista representative said there is an “active incentive” to participate.

The professional peer recommendations come from an online survey collected from more than 85,000 medical experts. The data was weighted based on the respondent’s profession and the confidence of their vote, on a scale from zero to 100 percent.

“We wanted to make this useful for the medical community, to say, what is the standing of a hospital relative to peers?” Kwietniewski said. “So we designed a big peer-to-peer survey where they can voice their opinion in that way.”

Hospital quality metrics and patient experience data came from publicly available sources. They measured the quality of care for specific treatments, safety and hygiene measures and staffing data. Patient experience measures factors like food quality, friendliness of staff, recommendation of hospital and overall patient satisfaction.

Each of these metrics varies by country, with some data offered by the national health care systems and insurance companies and also relying on Google reviews.

Because there isn’t a uniform system of international hospital and patent data, scores are only comparable between hospitals in the same country. For example, a Swiss hospital with a score of 91 is not necessarily better than a Japanese hospital with a score of 87.

Recommendations are the biggest factor in a hospital’s rank, accounting for 40 percent of the total score. A close second is hospital quality metrics at 37.5 percent, followed by patient experience (17 percent) and PROMs implementation (5 percent).

In addition to the country-specific lists, a list of the top 250 hospitals globally is also created. This list compiles hospitals from all 30 countries that performed in the top 20 percent in quality metrics and/or patient satisfaction in their respective country and met the grading threshold for the PROMs implementation.

According to Statista, the hospitals on the Global Top 250 List are “the very best hospitals in each country and, therefore, around the world.” These hospitals represent the top 10 percent of all hospitals listed and are numerically ranked without a score.

A new bibliometric score was also incorporated into the 2025 global list, to highlight the research and scientific advancements coming out of the top hospitals. This score is based on the h-index, which measures a publication’s productivity and impact by calculating the number of publications and the number of citations those publications have from other authors.

According to Statista, the bibliometric score was added as a factor for determining the global score as “a proxy for reputation based on metrics tied more closet to research output rather than expert opinion.”

Other changes to the World’s Best Hospitals list include the addition of new data sources for both quality metrics and patient satisfaction and the increased weight of both the hospital quality metrics and the PROMs survey to better reflect the reality of care.

More hospital accreditations were also included, like the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) Magnet Organization certification for Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

According to Statista, these updates indicate a shift toward value-based care over the past decade. The focus on PROMs also allows hospitals to create a database of data and encourages hospitals to advance or improve the implementation of both generic and condition-specific patient outcome measures.

Participation in the PROMS implementation survey increased by 50 percent this year, according to Statista, signaling a growing interest and commitment from hospitals to focus on patient-centered care.

Statista also found that technological innovations are being implemented with a patient-care focus to improve outcomes. The use of artificial intelligence and robotics has an “ever-expanding role” within the hospital landscape and is reshaping how hospitals deliver care.

For hospitals looking to improve their standing on the ranking, Kwietniewski of Statista said the hospitals that communicate their successes better usually have a higher reputation. This includes hospitals having websites with curated content highlighting advancements in research, successful surgeries and other notable accomplishments that are accessible to both patients and the medical community.

“That’s sometimes a challenge when you go to a hospital website—it’s very clinical, it’s something that caters more to professionals in that way,” Kwietniewski said. “And I think that’s one notable difference that helps to advance in the rankings over time.”

While there is no “one-stop fix,” Kwietniewski said hospitals that participate in Statista’s surveys and are transparent about their data metrics generally move up the rankings.

“Eventually, everyone in their lives will have the need for a hospital and there needs to be easily understandable reference points for that,” he said. “[Patients] need to have some aggregate information which helps them choose a good hospital. And I think from a leader perspective, that’s exactly also what I want to aspire towards.”