Harvard’s hospitals outscore whole countries in high-quality clinical research

Health-sciences rankings reveal outsized contribution of US hospitals

22 March 2024

JHVEPhoto/Getty Images

Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

With the release of the first Nature Index Health Sciences supplement last week, the strength of Harvard University, in Boston, Massachusetts, in the subject is clear. Its health-sciences output, measured by the metric Share, was 822.21 for the period 2022 to 2023*.

This far exceeds the Share of the second-ranked institution, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Bethesda, Maryland, at 290.42, and is just shy of Canada’s (823.54) — the fifth-ranked country in the subject.

But like many of the leading institutions in the Nature Index, Harvard is not a single entity. Several smaller affiliated institutions contribute to its overall output, and in the health sciences, hospitals are key players.

It is possible to view the performance of hospitals in the Nature Index by looking at the separate ranking for the healthcare sector. The leading 10 healthcare institutions for health-sciences output in the Nature Index are shown in the table below. (View the leading 100 healthcare institutions.)

The two strongest healthcare institutions in health-sciences output, the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), are both based in Boston and are both affiliated with Harvard. With a combined Share of 359.64, the contributions of these two hospitals represents more than 40% of Harvard’s Share in the subject for 2022 to 2023*.

The individual Shares of BWH and MGH, at 186.96 and 172.68 respectively, are not far off the Share of the University of California, San Francisco, (194.39), the fifth-ranked institution in the subject overall.

In addition to BWH and MGH, there are four other Harvard-affiliated hospitals that rank within the leading 100 healthcare institutions for health-sciences output in the Nature Index: Boston Children's Hospital (Share 81.34), Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (62.37), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (55.66), and Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (15.10).

Together, these six hospitals have a Share of 574.11, which is larger than the Shares of strong research countries such as the Netherlands (567.39), Japan (497.60) and Italy (423.45), which rank within the leading 10 countries in the subject.

City strengths

The strength of Harvard University, and its affiliated hospitals, in the Nature Index correlates with the large amount of funding that the Boston area and its institutions receive from the NIH — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.

According to Boston Municipal Research Bureau, the city’s medical, educational, biotechnology and healthcare institutions received US$2.3 billion from 4,097 research grants from the NIH in 2020, second only to New York City, whose institutions received $2.4 billion from 4,370 grants. Three hospitals – MGH, BWH and the Boston Children’s Hospital — accounted for 71.5% of total NIH funding to the city’s hospitals and health centres that year. In the Nature Index, which analyses city and metropolitan area outputs, the Boston Metropolitan Area leads in health-sciences output with a Share of 1,090.87 for the period 2022 to 2023 * . The New York Metropolitan Area (which covers New York City and its surrounding areas), comes in second, with a Share of 904.99.

It’s notable that although the top-ranked institution in the health sciences overall for 2022 to 2023 * was Harvard University, in the Boston Metropolitan Area, with a Share of 822.21, the leading institution in the New York Metropolitan Area for the subject was Columbia University in the City of New York, ranked 18 with a Share of 125.53. This speaks to the strength of Harvard’s affiliated institutions in the subject.

*Data for 2023 represents the period January–July 2023