U.S. News names best children’s hospitals, and unveils new category in behavioral health

For more than 15 years, U.S. News & World Report has been evaluating America’s top children’s hospitals.

Ben Harder, chief of health analysis and managing editor at U.S. News & World Report, says adding behavioral health to its analysis of the best children's hospitals reflects the uptick in kids with mental health needs.

U.S. News released its 2024-2025 rankings of the best children’s hospitals early Tuesday morning. In addition to naming top pediatric hospitals overall, U.S. News also examined hospitals in a host of specialties, ranging from cardiology to cancer.

This year, U.S. News has added a new specialty to its analysis: behavioral health.

Ben Harder, chief of health analysis and managing editor at U.S. News, tells Chief Healthcare Executive® that addition of behavioral health to its analysis reflects the growing number of kids and teens coming to pediatric hospitals for mental health needs.

“It really began both with hospitals raising it as something that they felt needed more attention, and that they felt that by evaluating it, U.S. News would both help families, which is our core mission, and help healthcare providers call attention to the fact that this is an under-resourced area of pediatric care,” Harder says.

“We've watched over the last several years, especially coming in the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, the rising behavioral health crisis, particularly among adolescents and children,” he adds. “And so that really motivated us to make sure that we were putting information in front of families and in front of the public that would help them seek and find the care that they may need for a child.”

• Read more: How U.S. News selects the Best Hospitals, and how the process has changed

In its inaugural study of behavioral health, U.S. News recognized 55 top pediatric hospitals in serving patients with mental health needs. The hospitals aren’t ranked from first to last. For its first inclusion of the behavioral health specialty, U.S. News chose to include them in a group and list them alphabetically. U.S. News initially sought to name the top 50, but a few facilities tied in the rankings, so the field expanded a bit.

“We wanted to make sure that we highlighted places where it is working well, where hospitals are providing a high level of care, getting patients the care that they need, providing families with the support that they need to help their child through the … psychiatric or psychological challenges that they that they're facing,” Harder says.

Leaders of children’s hospitals have said they are seeing an overwhelming number of kids with mental health needs. They say the uptick began before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it rose sharply during the pandemic. While some say the numbers have dropped from pandemic highs, they are still seeing more young people with mental health needs than they did before the pandemic.

Many parents deal with long waits for a bed in a behavioral unit to become available, Harder notes.

“Accessing pediatric care for behavioral health issues, particularly if it requires hospitalization, can be an enormous challenge,” Harder says. “There are lots of situations where patients are stuck in an emergency room because there's no bed in the behavioral health unit that's available to them.”

Matthew Cook, president and CEO of the Children’s Hospital Association, talked about the mental health crisis among children in a recent interview with Chief Healthcare Executive®.

“The emergency departments are not places for children with a mental health crisis,” Cook said. “We have a hard time placing them in the appropriate facility. So what you see are our kids staying in an ED for multiple days, which is highly inappropriate, and not good for the child. And so it's really been a challenge.”

Harder says U.S. News worked with many doctors and hospital leaders in developing its analysis of how pediatric hospitals fared in behavioral health. U.S. News sought input from clinicians in pediatric psychiatry, adolescent psychology and adolescent medicine, he says. There’s also some overlap in those areas with kids having multiple needs.

“We enlisted the help of many different clinical experts from these different fields that all fall kind of under pediatric and adolescent behavioral health,” Harder says. “And we also sought input from hospital leaders themselves.”

Harder says 90% of the methodology involving the behavioral health analysis involves objective data and measuring outcomes, such as practices around medication safety.

U.S. News also examined the clinical resources and expertise of children’s hospitals, he says. He says U.S. News also solicited input from child psychiatrists and adolescent medicine specialists to supplement the data analysis.

While U.S. News researchers gathered a vast amount of data and insights, Harder says the goal was to help make its analysis clear to readers.

“Part of our responsibility is not just gathering that information, but also making sense of it, so that families have a useful view through which they can identify hospitals that can help them,” he says.

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