We believe a socially responsible health system is possible, but to get there, we have to measure what matters. The Lown Hospitals Index produces data-driven metrics of equity, value, and outcomes, giving hospitals the information they need to improve, and empowering communities to hold them accountable. As the first ranking for hospital social responsibility, we strive to measure everything that matters to patients and communities—and we’re improving the Index each year.
Hospitals are essential care providers and lifelines for complex and emergency care in their communities. However, hospitals do more than just provide medical services. Hospitals make decisions every day that impact the health and well-being of their community, such as how they invest in community health initiatives, who they welcome into the hospital, and how much they pay their workers. The Lown Institute Hospitals Index is the first ranking to take these factors into account, including novel metrics like racial inclusivity and pay equity to create a holistic evaluation of hospital social responsibility.
The Lown Hospitals Index is a valuable resource for policymakers, researchers, hospital leaders, clinicians, journalists, community leaders, and all citizens that believe socially responsible hospitals are important. The rankings have been used to showcase hospital performance, identify key areas of improvement, and enact health system change in communities or institutions.
For 2025, we’ve made the following changes:
Read our methodology paper for the full list of changes.
Visit our hospital resources page for examples of how other hospitals have shared their recognition, learn about our badge licensing program, and request no-cost press release templates.
Yes. Hospital and system level data is available for purchase and can be customized to your specifications. Complete a Data Access Application or contact index@lowninstitute.org for more information. Additionally, our rankings, grades, and hospital characteristics data are available for download for free on the Rankings page.
For each detail (e.g. racial inclusivity, financial assistance), hospitals receive between 1-5 stars and a ranking. The star ratings of 1-5 are based on hospitals’ relative performance. Raw scores are divided into 5 regions based on either quantiles from a standard normal distribution or equal split of the range of values. In this way, many hospitals may receive the same star rating if they perform similarly on a metric.
The respective detail scores are weighted and combined to create grades and rankings for each component (eg. inclusivity, community benefit). Each hospital gets a grade: A (highest) to D (lowest) based on their relative performance compared to other hospitals. These component grades are then weighted to create grades for each category (equity, value, and outcomes).
Finally, an overall Social Responsibility grade is assigned based on the weighted grades from equity (40% weight), value (30%), and outcomes (30%).
We implemented two method changes this year: (1) We removed the COVID-19 burden data and (2) replaced it with hospital’s financial assistance information, if the hospital was included in our database of hospital financial assistance and debt collection policies.
Since 2023, we have been collecting data on a sample of 2,500 hospitals and publishing it in our Lown Institute Financial Assistance and Collections Policy Database. We collected information on hospital financial assistance and billing practices by reviewing financial assistance and collection policies available publicly on hospital websites and reaching out to hospitals via email to ask for confirmation of the data. Data that is visible on a hospital’s ranking page was collected between June 2024 and April 2025. Note, these results do not have any impact on a hospital or system’s Social Responsibility Grade.
The full Policy Database is available on our website, but we selected three data points from this to display on a hospital’s individual ranking webpage:
Some hospitals did not have enough patient stays to reliably calculate their cost-efficiency scores (93 hospitals) or did not have data available for two or more equity metrics (17 hospitals). These hospitals were not given a composite score, but were still graded on the components for which data were available.
The following types of hospitals are excluded from the Index:
See the methodology paper for more details.
The Lown Index rolls up scores from 42 detailed metrics, 8 components, and 3 categories to create an overall composite score.