The analysis comes from the digital healthcare company Medbelle. Being a company that focuses on digitised medical solutions, Medbelle looked at how infrastructure influences the patient experience. For example, a given city can have one world-class hospital, however if the overall medical framework does not provide an easy access solution or where and high-quality care is not provided across all citizens, then such a city will not necessarily feature in the upper levels of the poll.
The key measures assessed were: Infrastructure, Quality of Care, and Access. In addition, several sub-categories were included beneath each of the key measures, such as medical education and the number of hospital beds, to the shortage of nurses and the cancer treatment efficiency.
Medbelle developed their ranking of the best hospital cities by assessing the hospital ecosystem throughout each of the assessed cities. The aim of the poll was to celebrate cities offering the best overall medical care, and to develop a benchmark for future comparisons. The benchmark also serves to provide a means for cities in the lower reaches of the list of for those cities which did not make the top 100 at all to note where they can improve, especially in areas like medical education, accessibility, and overall infrastructure.
The headline figure from the research is that Tokyo, Japan is the best hospital city in the world. In addition, London comes out as the best hospital city in the U.K. followed by Cambridge, and Manchester.
The global top ten was:
1. Tokyo, Japan
2. Boston, USA
3. London, UK
4. Paris, France
5. Seoul, South Korea
6. Munich, Germany
7. Melbourne, Australia
8. Amsterdam, Netherlands
9. Basel, Switzerland
10. Berlin, Germany
Much of the analysis was performed using a geographic information system (GIS). This technology refers to a framework for gathering, managing and analyzing data. GIS analyzes spatial location and organizes layers of information into visualizations using maps and 3D scenes. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries, analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, and present the results of all these operations.
Commenting on the study, Daniel Kolb, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Medbelle said about the U.K. outcome: “It’s fascinating how GIS Mapping technology has been utilised within this study to allocate UK healthcare data points on a city-by-city basis within an NHS (National Health Service) trust for the first time. This kind of dataset provides a unique opportunity to benchmark cities’ hospital infrastructure against each other.”
