Three Kentucky hospitals, including St. Elizabeth-Edgewood, among Newsweek’s ranking for cancer care


By Melissa Patrick
Kentucky Health News

Three Kentucky hospitals have been named among the top 200 hospitals for cancer care in Newsweek‘s third annual ranking of America’s Best Cancer Hospitals.

The University of Kentucky Albert B. Chandler Hospital’s Markey Cancer Center in Lexington was ranked among the top 50 cancer centers nationwide, at 43. The report also highlighted its excellence in lung and breast cancer care.

Markey has been a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center since 2013 and is one of only 57 cancer centers in the country to earn the NCI’s Comprehensive Cancer Center designation, according to a university press release.

The other Kentucky hospitals making the list are Baptist Health Lexington, at 145, and St. Elizabeth Edgewood Hospital, at 165.

This year, more than two million people in the United States are expected to be diagnosed with some form of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society‘s Cancer Facts & Figures 2025 report.

In Kentucky, which leads the nation in both cancer cases and cancer deaths, that same report estimates there will be 30,420 new cases of cancer in 2025.

Newsweek partnered with Statista, a research firm, to compile the list.

“To compile the data used in this ranking, tens of thousands of medical professionals and hospital managers participated in a nationwide online survey. Their responses were factored in alongside publicly available hospital quality metrics, patient satisfaction scores and patient-reported outcome measures implementation scores,” according to a Newsweek news release.

A summary of the methodology says hospitals with a one-star rating with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services were not eligible for the ranking, and hospitals with a very small number of beds were also not considered.

MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Mayo Clinic-Rochester, and the Cleveland Clinic were ranked as the top four cancer care hospitals.