Who Are the Best Healthcare Employers in the U.S.?

MHA and healthcare MBA students interviewing for internships and jobs at graduation would be wise to review three new rankings of employer quality in America’s healthcare industry. Although little correlation exists among the top-ranked employers in these survey results, these reports nevertheless provide interesting data that’s useful in formulating job search strategies.

In February 2022, Forbes released the latest edition of its annual survey of the employers in the United States best-liked by employees, titled “America’s Best Employers 2022.” The survey of workers at firms employing at least 1,000 people was conducted by the statistics platform Statista and interviewed a huge sample of 60,000 respondents. Statisticians generally consider a sample size above 60,000 sufficient to accurately predict the outcome of a Presidential election in the United States, so the Statista sample size was certainly large enough to identify a group of best-liked companies.

In terms of methodology, Statista asked the survey respondents to rate their employers on factors such as pay packages, working conditions, and career development opportunities. Participants also rated diversity, equity, and inclusion—essential considerations for most American employees in 2022.

And by asking participants how likely they’d be to recommend their employer to someone looking for a new job, Statista asked the participants the most important question in marketing research. With responses scaled from zero to ten, that “how likely are you to recommend” question results in a crucial average metric known as the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. We explain this metric’s tremendous significance in the sidebar below this article.

Thirty-five large hospital systems made the list, topped off by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and the Mayo Clinic’s flagship medical center in Rochester, Minnesota. Some medium-sized healthcare systems earned high marks as well.

Forbes posted their results online in a searchable database comprised of two groups of 500 companies each: large employers above 5,000 employees, and medium-sized employers with workforces in the range of 1,000 to 5,000 employees. The magazine distributed the healthcare employers among a few categories; most health systems, like the Mayo Clinic, appear in the “Health Care and Social” category, with other firms visible in the “Health Care Equipment and Services” category.

Along with their rankings, here are the 35 health systems and medical centers from Forbes’ list of the best large employers:

1. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
4. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City
7. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota
9. University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas
10. MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston
13. MaineHealth, Portland, Maine
19. Northwestern Medicine, Chicago
37. Houston Methodist
39. Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus
42. UCLA Health, Los Angeles
43. Penn Medicine, Philadelphia
47. Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville
50. Legacy Health, Portland, Oregon
55. Emory Healthcare, Atlanta
60. University Hospitals, Cleveland
67. Deaconess Health System, Evansville
74. Duke University Health System, Durham
77. UCHealth, Aurora, Colorado
86. Orlando Health
89. Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus
91. University of Maryland Medical System, Baltimore
94. Cleveland Clinic
101. Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore
122. MUSC Health, Charleston, South Carolina
126. BayCare, Clearwater, Florida
128. Norton Healthcare, Louisville
130. Baptist Health, Louisville
138. The University of Kansas Health System, Kansas City
154. ChristianaCare, Newark, Delaware
157. Yale New Haven Health
166. Piedmont Healthcare, Atlanta
172. University of Rochester Medical Center
197. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
199. Akron Children’s Hospital
407. Health First, Rockledge, Florida

Forbes wasn’t the only business magazine to recently rank healthcare organizations. In September 2022, Fortune Magazine and the global workplace authority Great Place to Work (GPW) released their updated yearly list of the “Best Places to Work in Health Care.”

For this survey, GPW evaluated responses from 161,000 employees, a sample 168 percent greater than even the Forbes survey. Minimum eligibility requirements for the large workplace list included a 1,000-employee workforce and previous certification as a “Great Place to Work.”

According to Fortune’s methodology statement, unlike the Forbes effort, this survey does not rely on Net Promoter Scores at all. Instead, GPW asks employees to share feedback about their company’s corporate culture by asking if they agree or disagree with 60 statements paired with five-point Likert scales. “Collectively, these statements describe a great employee experience, defined by high levels of trust, respect, credibility, fairness, pride, and camaraderie,” says Fortune’s statement. Respondents are also asked to reply to two open-ended essay question prompts.

Here are the top 30 companies from the list of the best healthcare employers compiled by GPW for Fortune. Besides hospital systems, Fortune’s list also includes pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies, and device manufacturers.

1. Texas Health Resources, Arlington
2. Elevance Health, Indianapolis
3. Southern Ohio Medical Center, Portsmouth
4. Blue Shield of California, Oakland
5. Northwell Health, New Hyde Park, New York
6. Baptist Health South Florida, Coral Gables
7. Ohio Health, Columbus
8. Scripps Health, San Diego
9. WellStar Health System, Atlanta
10. Atlantic Health System, Morristown, New Jersey
11. Shields Health Solutions, Boston
12. Aya Healthcare, San Diego
13. White Glove Placement, Brooklyn
14. Jackson Healthcare, Alpharetta, Georgia
15. IEHP, Rancho Cucamonga, California
16. ChenMed, Miami
17. Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, California
18. Desert Oasis Healthcare, Palm Springs, California
19. Teladoc Health, Purchase, New York
20. Paradigm Corp, Walnut Creek, California
21. BayCare Health System, Clearwater, Florida
22. AmerisourceBergen, Conshohocken, Pennsylvania
23. Enhabit Home Health & Hospice, Dallas
24. Premise Health, Brentwood, Tennessee
25. Benco Dental Supply, Pittston, Pennsylvania
26. FinThrive, Alpharetta, Georgia
27. Centene, St. Louis
28. AbleTo, New York City
29. Abbott Laboratories, Green Oaks, Illinois
30. Q-Centrix, Chicago, IL

In June 2022, LinkedIn released its ranking entitled “Top Companies 2022: Health Care.” This list is based on very different criteria from the Forbes and Fortune lists. The LinkedIn list is designed to strictly focus on recognizing companies with the best prospects for career growth and progression (e.g., promotions, salary raises). For that reason, this list will probably seem especially interesting and useful to ambitious MHA and healthcare MBA students interviewing for internships or jobs upon graduation.

By relying upon internal data from members, Linkedin exploits a clear competitive advantage unavailable to survey firms like Statista and GPW, who are forced to rely upon traditional marketing research techniques like questionaries and phone interviews. That’s a significant advantage because the proportion of Americans who will actually answer a call from a marketing research interviewer has plummeted to an almost insignificant percentage. The main factor that contributed to this outcome was the widespread adoption of Caller ID call screening on smartphones since the iPhone’s debut in mid-2007.

Less clear is whether LinkedIn can argue that because its social networking data is publicly displayed on member profiles and subject to “social proof,” its data is necessarily more credible than answers on questionnaires. That may be the case, but MHAOnline couldn’t find compelling evidence of such a credibility advantage for this report. It’s also not necessarily clear that respondents would have reasons to lie on questionnaires by claiming their employers treat them better than they really do because all the questionnaires in the Statista and GPW studies are anonymous.

Moreover, LinkedIn claims that its rankings are based on seven categories of data “pillars” purportedly correlated with employee promotions and career progression. Although these correlations intuitively seem to make sound theoretical sense, in its methodology the firm provides zero statistical evidence that supports their assertions that these correlations actually exist. Nevertheless, the seven pillars include:

• Ability to advance: The rate of promotions within a firm, calculated from announcements posted by members on LinkedIn profiles.
• Skills growth: The rate at which employees are adding skills recognized by LinkedIn to their profiles.
• Company stability: The proportion of employees employed more than three years at the company, compared with that firm’s attrition rate during the past 12 months.
• External opportunities: Interest in the firm’s workers by headhunters, apparently measured by interactions with employees on the platform with recruiters known to LinkedIn.
• Company affinity: This metric evaluates the LinkedIn connection percentage among the firm’s employees, as a proxy measure of how “supportive” the corporate culture may be.
• Gender diversity: The firm’s gender parity ratios.
• Educational background: The average education levels attained by the firm’s workforce.

With that analysis in mind, here are the 25 companies from the list of the best healthcare employers compiled by LinkedIn:

1. Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California
2. Arthrex, Naples, Florida
3. Parexel, Waltham, Massachusetts
4. Athenahealth, Watertown, Massachusetts
5. Teladoc Health, Purchase, New York
6. Walgreens Boots Alliance, Deerfield, Illinois
7. MicroVention, Aliso Viejo, California
8. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore
9. CVS Health, Woonsocket, Rhode Island
10. City of Hope, Duarte, California
11. ZEISS Medical Technology, Dublin, California
12. Hologic, Marlborough, California
13. Allscripts, Chicago
14. UnitedHealth Group, Minnetonka, Minnesota
15. Galderma, Fort Worth
16. Avanos Medical, Alpharetta, Georgia
17. Curology, San Francisco
18. UChicago Medicine
19. Varian Medical Systems, Palo Alto, California
20. University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore
21. Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Raritan, New Jersey
22. Nevro, Redwood City, California
23. Medtronic, Minneapolis
24. Pfizer, New York City
25. Elanco, Clinton, Indiana

This has to be the “million-dollar question” that emerged from our analysis. One might reasonably expect that many of the same employers would appear on all three lists. However, that didn’t happen.

We were surprised to recognize only four employers that appear on more than one list. They include:

• BayCare Health System, Clearwater, Florida
• Teladoc Health, Purchase, New York
• University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore
• Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore

Apparently, these curious results imply that if one wants the utmost assurance, they’re working for one of the best healthcare employers, they would have their choice of only three cities in the United States: Clearwater, Florida, Purchase, New York, or Baltimore.

Why do Forbes and Statista so heavily weigh the question of how likely a survey respondent might be to recommend their employer to someone looking for a new job? They do that because of revolutionary advances in the field of marketing research during the past two decades.

Bain & Company—one of the top three management consulting firms in the world—published a landmark marketing research study in the Harvard Business Review in 2003. The firm found that the lengthy customer research questionnaires that had been standard in the field of marketing research since the 1950s were no longer optimal.

That’s because the Bain consultants’ research demonstrated that by collecting customer responses on a 10-point Likert scale to a single question that was “radically simple,” the results were profound. With this question, marketers could now assess customer loyalty more accurately than by using the traditional—and extensive—marketing research surveys.

Most MHAOnline readers will recognize this question because they have already seen it many times, especially in email messages from businesses. Here it is:

On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend us to your friends or colleagues?

The field of marketing research would never be the same. In this brief video, Bain’s Managing Partner Rob Markey explains that the firm decided to call this average value the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. That’s because the consultants labeled as “Promoters” the respondents who reported scores between 9.0 and 10.0.

Bain found that only the most enthusiastic and loyal customers reported scores in this range. For most companies, more than 80 percent of their referrals come from Promoters. MHAOnline readers familiar with management expert Ken Blanchard and his classic treatise The One Minute Manager know customers like these by their more common name: raving fans. They’re the folks sleeping on the sidewalks in front of Apple Stores, so they’ll be among the first in the world to buy the newest iPhone model.

However, most firms can still be successful with NPS metrics far below 9.0, because most experts believe that scores above 5.0 are excellent. Typically, Ritz-Carlton and Apple earn around a 7.0 average score. And who has the world’s best customer satisfaction ratings? With NPS scores around 9.6 consistently during the past few years, that firm would be Tesla.

This is why Forbes and Statista heavily rely upon the question of how likely a survey respondent would be to recommend their employer. Two decades of research show that it’s an extremely accurate and unbiased technique. It’s also efficient, in that it allows survey research firms to dispense with asking the 60 or more questions that would often be necessary to produce accurate results—as Fortune and GPW apparently continue to do by applying that useful but dated approach.