On Monday, Thomson Reuters released its 19th-annual study identifying the 100 top U.S. hospitals based on their overall organizational performance.

The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals study, which as been conducted annually since 1993, evaluates performance in 10 categories: mortality, medical complications, patient safety, average patient stay, expenses, profitability, patient satisfaction, adherence to clinical standards of care, post-discharge mortality, and readmission rates for acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), heart failure and pneumonia.

[See also: Top 100 hospitals named for 2011.]

"This year, the concentration of 100 Top Hospitals award winners shifted significantly, with Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and California housing the most winners. Texas actually had the highest concentration of winners – 14 of them. In the past few years, the mid-western states were the states with the highest concentration, like Michigan, Illinois and Ohio," said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president at Thomson Reuters. "A major change in performance geographically is an encouraging indication that the bar for quality care has been raised once again. Small hospitals in general are doing better this year and making a lot of improvements."

For the fourth year, Thomson Reuters is also recognizing the 100 Top Hospitals Everest Award winners, which are those hospitals among the 100 winners that delivered the greatest rate of improvement over five years. This year, there are 12 Everest Award winners, according to Chenoweth.

To conduct the 100 Top Hospitals study, Thomson Reuters researchers evaluated 2,886 short-term, acute-care, non-federal hospitals. They used public information like Medicare cost reports and core measures and patient satisfaction data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare website, said Chenoweth. Hospitals do not apply for the awards and winners do not pay to market this honor.

“We see that the highest-scoring hospitals tend to have a lot of collaboration with other hospitals,” said Chenoweth. “What’s important are the benchmarks to help hospitals improve their performances. Hospitals can purchase other hospitals’ reports and use them to learn from each other and what they might be doing differently.”

[See also: Thomson Reuters names top hospitals for heart care.]

If all Medicare inpatients received the same level of care as those treated in the award-winning facilities: more than 186,000 additional lives could be saved; approximately 56,000 additional patients could be complication free; more than $4.3 billion could be saved; and the average patient stay would decrease by nearly half a day.

Here is a list of the winning hospitals, by category, with asterisks indicating the Everest Award winners. Chenoweth said the hospitals are not ranked within each list.

Read the full list on the next page.