UC San Diego Health Achieves Top National Ranking for Patient Care and Safety in Vizient’s 2025 Quality Leadership Study
UC San Diego Health has once again demonstrated its exemplary commitment to patient care and safety by ranking among the nation’s premier healthcare providers in the 2025 Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Ranking, conducted by Vizient, Inc. This annual evaluation benchmarks hospitals across the United States on critical quality dimensions—safety, mortality, effectiveness, efficiency, patient-centeredness, and overall quality of care—derived from an extensive data analysis that integrates clinical, patient experience, and infection control metrics. This year marks the seventh consecutive year UC San Diego Health has been honored with this prestigious recognition, underscoring the health system’s unwavering dedication to clinical excellence and comprehensive patient safety protocols.
The Vizient Quality and Accountability Study is an intricate assessment tool that sifts through voluminous datasets, including information from the Vizient Clinical Data Base, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey, and infection tracking through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). By leveraging this multifaceted data assimilation, the study generates a robust framework that evaluates hospital performance with scientific rigor and statistical precision. UC San Diego Health’s inclusion among the top tier of performers is reflective of its successful integration of evidence-based clinical practices, patient engagement strategies, and system-wide safety initiatives.
Nationally, 1,220 hospitals voluntarily participate in the Vizient study, which segregates participants into seven distinct cohorts reflecting different institutional profiles and operational scales. UC San Diego Health belongs to the Comprehensive Academic Medical Centers cohort, an elite category encompassing hospitals with extensive research, teaching, and clinical capabilities. Within this high-stakes group of 118 health systems, UC San Diego Health secured the ninth position, a testament to its robust infrastructure, innovation in clinical protocols, and unwavering focus on patient outcomes. Achieving this rank requires more than just operational excellence—it necessitates a culture deeply rooted in continuous quality improvement and interdisciplinary collaboration.
The comprehensive nature of the study also evaluates outpatient care excellence, a growing focal point as healthcare increasingly moves beyond inpatient settings toward ambulatory services. UC San Diego Health’s outstanding performance in outpatient care was further confirmed by its ranking as 19th among 66 physician groups in the 2025 Vizient Ambulatory Quality and Accountability Ranking. This segment of the study emphasizes five critical domains—access to care, continuum of care, quality, efficiency, and care variation—utilizing data from the AAMC-Vizient Clinical Practice Solutions Center and operational throughput metrics. Such an evaluation underscores UC San Diego Health’s systematic approach to delivering seamless, high-quality care across both hospital and clinic environments.
Behind these rankings lies an infrastructure that blends rigorous data analytics with a patient-centered ethos. The institution’s commitment to transparency and continuous refinement is apparent in investments toward advanced clinical decision support systems, multidisciplinary team engagement, and targeted quality improvement initiatives. Notably, patient safety efforts include harnessing predictive analytics to preempt adverse events, deploying standardized care pathways to reduce variability, and fostering a culture where frontline caregivers actively contribute to safety innovations. This data-driven yet human-centric model facilitates real-time responsiveness and adaptive learning in clinical operations.
UC San Diego Health’s leadership has consistently emphasized that these accolades are collective achievements borne of strategic vision and operational discipline. Patty Maysent, CEO of UC San Diego Health, highlights that their sustained recognition echoes not only technical proficiency but also a compassionate approach to healthcare delivery. The institution’s focus extends beyond traditional clinical outcomes to encompass equity, ensuring that all patient populations receive fair and just access to world-class care. Such holistic attention to social determinants of health complements the measurable improvements in clinical safety and quality metrics.
Patient experience scores, a critical component of the Vizient analysis, provide direct insight into how care is perceived by those who receive it. By integrating HCAHPS survey outcomes, the ranking system incorporates dimensions such as communication clarity, hospital environment, and responsiveness, thus ensuring that quality assessments are multidimensional and encompass the subjective experience of care. UC San Diego Health’s sustained high performance in these patient-generated metrics signals successful engagement strategies that empower patients and families as active partners in care decisions.
The health system’s capability to balance top-tier inpatient performance with ambulatory excellence is crucial in an era where chronic disease management and preventive health are paramount. Brendan Kremer, COO of UC San Diego Health, remarks upon the institution’s expanding footprint into outpatient settings, where quality and safety must be enshrined with the same rigor as in hospital wards. This integrated care model leverages electronic health records, coordinated care teams, and predictive modeling to streamline transitions of care, reduce hospital readmissions, and optimize health maintenance interventions.
Chief Quality and Patient Safety Officer Chad VanDenBerg credits the organization’s consistent top-tier performance to a deeply embedded culture of collaboration and accountability. Emphasizing data transparency and continuous learning, UC San Diego Health maintains extensive investment in safety infrastructure and workforce education. Their approach systematically analyzes near misses and sentinel events to inform proactive measures, ensuring improvements are sustained and scaled. This culture fosters resilience and innovation, allowing the health system to adeptly navigate emergent challenges while upholding rigorous safety standards.
UC San Diego Health’s infrastructure comprises multiple specialized hospitals, including Hillcrest Medical Center, Jacobs Medical Center, and East Campus Medical Center, which collectively support a diverse range of specialties such as oncology, cardiology, geriatrics, neurology, and pulmonology. These are complemented by world-renowned centers like the Moores Cancer Center and the Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center, which integrate cutting-edge research with clinical expertise to push the boundaries of medical knowledge and patient outcomes. Advanced clinical programs and translational research fueling these centers directly inform best practices, contributing to the system’s stellar quality metrics.
The recognition period for this 2025 Quality Leadership Ranking spans from July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2025, setting a clear timeframe for data collection, analysis, and validation. This window ensures that ranking outcomes reflect contemporary practices and real-time operational performance, enabling benchmarking that both guides and accelerates quality improvement efforts. The integration of data from multiple sources and the temporal precision of the analysis provide stakeholders—including patients, payers, and policymakers—a reliable and actionable portrait of healthcare excellence.
As UC San Diego Health continues to navigate the evolving landscape of healthcare, its distinguishing attributes remain its data-centric approach, patient-focused culture, and collaborative framework for improvement. These elements combined forge a model for academic health systems nationwide, advancing the field not only through clinical outcomes but through innovative, sustainable strategies that emphasize safety, equity, and patient empowerment inside and outside traditional hospital settings. The hospital’s top rankings thus represent not a culmination but a standard of ongoing excellence that charts the future for healthcare quality.
Subject of Research: Hospital quality and patient safety performance evaluation
Article Title: UC San Diego Health Achieves Top National Ranking for Patient Care and Safety in Vizient’s 2025 Quality Leadership Study
News Publication Date: Not explicitly stated (recognition period July 2024 – June 2025)
Web References:
- https://health.ucsd.edu/
- https://health.ucsd.edu/news
Image Credits: UC San Diego Health
Keywords: Health care, Hospitals, Health care delivery, Health and medicine
