Your vote matters—the U.S. News & World Report’s ‘Best Hospitals’ rankings

Dear Colleagues,

Voting has begun for the 2026-2027 U.S. News & World Report annual rankings of Best Children’s Hospitals and Best Hospital’s Adult Specialties. The voters for these rankings are exclusively physicians – and so you have a very special role to play in achieving the national recognition our work deserves.

If you are a physician in an eligible, board-certified specialty, please make sure you vote on Doximity by March 28. And, if you know a physician in one of the eligible specialties, please encourage them to vote for UC Davis Medical Center and UC Davis Children’s Hospital.  

While all votes are important, physicians who have not been affiliated with UC Davis now or in the past count for more credit than physicians who have connections (residency, alumni, fellowships, prior employment).  Please consider reaching out to your non-affiliated physician colleagues and asking them to make UC Davis Medical Center one of their five votes in the rankings.  U.S. News says most ballots are submitted with some blank nomination spots.  These efforts are incredibly important to improving our national ranking in these specialty areas.  

Additional instructions with clear details are being emailed to eligible physicians, so please look for that message in your inbox. 

Teamwork and quality of care

U.S. News asks board-certified physicians nationwide to vote for up to five institutions/hospitals to whom they would refer patients if geography were no issue.  Please share your pride with physician colleagues at other institutions (as well as your former trainees and former medical students) and encourage them to vote for your specialty. As noted above, each eligible physician gets to vote for multiple institutions, and we deserve to be one of them.

Hospital and specialty care rankings are based upon different metrics – hospital rankings are more outcomes-driven and reflective of the care delivered. To put this into additional context, the U.S. News hospital rankings are quite similar to the metrics we use for our own benchmarking and comparisons.

The recognition we annually receive through the U.S. News rankings is a reflection of the patient-centric excellence of our teams and employees. In 2025, the UC Davis Medical Center ranked as the No. 1 hospital in Sacramento and No. 7 in California. The medical center has been the No.1 hospital in Sacramento for 14 consecutive years and among the Top 10 in the state for the past 11 years. In 2025, we also rated “High Performing,” the highest rating possible, in sixteen adult procedures and conditions.

These rankings are an important differentiator for UC Davis Health in our service area, and also help to reassure patients they do not need to travel outside our region to get nationally-ranked health care. They also help promote, by association, the quality of our School of Medicine and School of Nursing, of our training programs, and of our research efforts. In short, reputation matters across our missions.

Thank you for everything you do to care for our communities and for one another. Your hard work and accomplishments matter deeply, and I’m personally grateful for the value you bring forward every day. Our shared commitment will guide UC Davis Health forward in patient care, medical education, and innovation too!

Stay well,

Bruce Lee Hall, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A.
Chief Clinical Officer