By Lara Azar, Vitals contributor

Brian White was building furniture at a Berkeley workshop one moment and was the subject of a frantic 911 call the next. Less than 30 minutes later, the stroke victim was being evaluated by a dedicated team at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland—where he became the 100th patient to undergo a special procedure known as a thrombectomy, available at only a limited number of hospitals across the country.

Paul Bauer of Davis, Calif., was relaxing at home with his wife one day last spring when he suddenly fell, unable to speak. Recognizing the telltale sign of a facial droop, Mary Bauer called an ambulance to rush her husband to Sutter Davis Hospital—where he received a new drug known as TNK to dissolve the clot in his brain and help prevent permanent brain damage after his stroke.

Joe Soto was about to take his grandson home from Little League practice when his consciousness seemed to fade. His grandson called for help from his coaches, who summoned first responders. Diagnosing his stroke almost immediately, they transported him to Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento, a nationally recognized Advanced Comprehensive Stroke Center. He calls his grandson a hero; his care team calls Soto a miracle.

Stories like these abound across the Sutter Health integrated network of care in Northern California. It is one of the largest such systems in the region to have advanced stroke certification distinctions in multiple hospitals—large and small, urban and rural, from the Bay Area to the Sacramento Valley.

U.S. News & World Report, the global authority in hospital rankings and consumer advice, today named nine Sutter network hospitals as 2022 High Performing hospitals for stroke care—the highest award a hospital can earn for U.S. News’ Best Hospitals Procedures & Conditions ratings. More than a dozen Sutter hospital campuses altogether were recognized by U.S. News & World Report for their performance across a variety of procedures and conditions.

In fact, Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento—the hospital Soto credits with saving his life—was ranked among the best hospitals in California (42nd) and in the Sacramento metro area (4th), as well as among the best in the region, earning special “high performing” recognition in a total of nine categories. In addition to stroke, those include maternity care, aortic valve surgery, heart bypass surgery, congestive heart failure, heart attack, hip replacement, hip fracture and prostate cancer surgery. State and metro area rankings reflect the highest performing hospitals in the area across multiple areas of care.

Other Sutter network hospitals earning special recognition from U.S. News & World Report include:

• California Pacific Medical Center – Van Ness Campus | High Performer in Stroke; Congestive Heart Failure; Colon Cancer Surgery; Hip Fracture; Uterine Cancer Surgery
• Sutter Roseville Medical Center | High Performer in Stroke; COPD; Hip Fracture; Lung Cancer Surgery
• Mills-Peninsula Medical Center | High Performer in Stroke; Congestive Heart Failure; Hip Fracture
• Memorial Medical Center, Modesto | High Performer in Stroke; COPD
• Sutter Delta Medical Center | High Performer in Congestive Heart Failure; COPD
• California Pacific Medical Center – Davies Campus | High Performer in Stroke
• Alta Bates Summit Medical Center – Oakland | High Performer in Stroke
• Eden Medical Center | High Performer in Stroke
• Novato Community Hospital | High Performer in Hip Fracture
• Sutter Amador Hospital | High Performer in Stroke
• Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital | High Performer in Hip Fracture
• Sutter Surgical Hospital – North Valley | High Performer in Spinal Fusion

For the 2022-2023 Best Hospitals rankings and ratings, U.S. News evaluated more than 4,500 hospitals across 15 specialties and 20 procedures and conditions. Fewer than half of all hospitals received any High Performing rating, and only four earned this rating in all procedures and conditions.

The U.S. News Procedures & Conditions methodology is based entirely on objective measures of quality such as survival rates, patient experience, and how successfully each hospital helps patients get back home.