News

Three hospitals in region make Forbes's 5-star list

By Bill Moss, Published: December 8, 2025

Three hospitals in the region made Forbes magazine's first-ever list of 5-star hospitals — UNC Health Pardee, AdventHealth and Mission HCA.

The Pardee Foundation announced its honor in a "Dear Friends of Pardee" email on Monday, calling it "a prestigious recognition based on rigorous, independent evaluation of clinical outcomes, patient experience, safety and value."

Pardee was one of only nine hospitals in North Carolina to receive an overall 5-star rating. Mission also earned 5-star status while AdventHealth earned 4 stars. Given its troubles with state and federal health regulators and flagging reputation in the region, Mission's rating was a bit of a surprise. While the HCA-owned provider won 5 stars for outcomes, it got whacked with 1 star for patient experience, the only one of the 29 4- and 5-star performers in North Carolina to achieve just 1 star in that category. Pardee won 5 stars for patient experience, Advent Health 4.

Forbes measured hospitals' performance across four key categories of care:

• Clinical Outcomes: 25 measures such as mortality, 30-day readmission rates and surgical-site infection rates.
• Best Practices: 10 measures evaluating adherence to evidence-based care.
• Value: Seven measures assessing cost efficiency and resource use.
• Patient Experience: 14 patient-reported experience metrics.

"This distinction speaks to the extraordinary compassion and skill of Pardee clinicians and caregivers," Pardee Foundation said. "Their dedication to excellent outcomes and patient experience ensure that Pardee continues to maintain the highest standard of care for our community."

To produce its first Top Hospitals ratings, Forbes enlisted healthcare measurement experts, used a healthcare data and analytics firm and vetted data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Provider Data Catalog.

"From this dataset," editors said, "we identified healthcare quality measures that assess patient outcomes, hospital best practices, value, and patient experience. These measures were chosen specifically because they have been developed and regularly tested by leaders in the healthcare community to meet rigorous national standards."