Best Hospital For Maternity Care: Palo Alto Hospital On U.S. News List

PALO ALTO, CA — Where their baby is born is one of the most important decisions parents make. In California, 67 hospitals were ranked among the Best Hospitals for Maternity Care for 2022-23 released Tuesday by U.S. News & World Report.

In the ranking of nearly 650 hospitals providing labor and delivery services, fewer than half received the “high performing” designation, the highest a hospital can receive for maternity care.

Of the 650 California hospitals that participated in the maternity services survey, 67 of those, including Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, received the “high performing” designation.

The reasons for Lucile Packard Children's Hospital's rating, according to data released by U.S. News & World Report, included the hospital never or rarely scheduling delivery earlier than recommended, a low number of avoidable C-sections, an average rate of only 3.2 percent of newborn complications and recognition as Birthing-Friendly because the hospital participated in a quality improvement collaborative and implemented patient safety practices in order to improve maternal outcomes.

Each hospital participating in the survey received a scorecard describing their performance on a checklist of items parents look for when choosing where to have their baby.

Other CA hospitals that completed the U.S. News survey, but did not rank as “high performing” were UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento and John Muir Health-Walnut Creek Medical Center.

U.S. News said relatively little information is readily available to the public about which hospitals are best at caring for expectant parents after an uncomplicated pregnancy.

The ranking differs from other hospital rankings in an important way: The patients at maternity hospitals are younger, so the data used in the rankings was collected individually from the hospitals, rather than through required Medicare reports.

The rankings are based on C-section rates in lower-risk pregnancies, newborn complication rates, exclusive breast milk feeding rates and early elective delivery rates, among other factors.

This year for the first time as part of its methodology, U.S. News considered rates of episiotomy procedures (a small cut made at the vaginal opening to assist in difficult deliveries), rates of vaginal births of subsequent children after a Cesarean delivery, and whether hospitals met new federal criteria for “birthing-friendly” practices — a publicly reported, public-facing designation by the Department of Health and Human Services to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity.

Also new this year, hospitals that tracked and reported their outcomes for patients of different races and ethnicities were rewarded in the rankings.

“Identifying racial disparities in maternity care is a vital step toward achieving health equity,” Min Hee Seo, senior health data scientist at U.S. News, said in a news release.

“The new measures provide expectant parents with many important data points, such as whether hospitals implemented patient safety practices, to assist them in making a decision about where to receive maternity care,” Seo said.