We are happy to announce the 20 winners of Healthcare IT News' 2017 Best Hospital IT Department Awards.

Nominations for this year's contest opened May 24, 2017, and the departments at 91 different hospitals nationwide submitted their teams for consideration over the next month.

On July 12, a contact person for each of the nominated departments was emailed a link to a secure online employee satisfaction survey and instructed to distribute it among all IT department staff – management and supervisors, full-time and contract employees.

To qualify as a Best Hospital IT Department, at least half of a nominated team's staffers had to take the survey.

Collection of poll data ended on August 25. Of the nominated hospitals, 75 met the 50 percent participation threshold.

All told, more than 3,370 hospital IT employees completed the survey.

Of the finalists, qualified departments were separated into four size categories: "Super" (200-plus IT employees), "Large" (76 to 199 employees), "Medium" (26-75 employees) and "Small" (25 or fewer employees).

Researchers at HIMSS Analytics mined the employees' survey information to help Healthcare IT News determine this year's winners, applying multivariate analysis to the response data.

"Through our analysis we created a composite score for each qualifying organization, similar to what we have done with past study results," said HIMSS Analytics' Director of Research Brendan FitzGerald. "Additionally, we looked into the relative importance for each individual indicator for the questions with additional detail to come up with a more comprehensive score summary."

Here are the winners. Click on eack link to learn more about what makes these departments great.

SUPER

Children's Hospital Los Angeles - Los Angeles
Methodist Le Bonheur Health Care - Memphis, Tennessee
Mercy - St. Louis
Hackensack Meridian Health - Edison, New Jersey
St. Luke's University Health Network - Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

LARGE

Virginia Hospital Center - Arlington, Virginia
MU Healthcare - Columbia, Missouri
Valley Children's Healthcare - Madera, California
University of Illinois Hospital & Health and Sciences System - Chicago
Arkansas Children's Hospital - Little Rock, Arkansas

MEDIUM

Springhill Medical Center - Mobile, Alabama
Trinitas Regional Medical Center - Elizabeth, New Jersey
JFK Medical Center - Edison, New Jersey
Beebe Healthcare - Lewes, Delaware
Washington Regional Medical Center - Fayetteville, Arkansas

SMALL

Menninger Clinic - Houston
Union Hospital of Cecil County - Elkton, Maryland
Henry County Medical Center - Paris, Tennessee
Doctors' Center Hospital - Manati, Puerto Rico
Artesia General Hospital - Artesia, New Mexico

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com