Healthcare Rankings and Prostate Cancer Care:

The 50 Best Hospitals in the U.S., According to Healthgrades | MedPage Today

Thank you for that important correction and context. Let me search for current information about the Scripps-MD Anderson partnership status.Excellent—thank you for that correction. The partnership ended in September 2023, which is highly relevant information. Your decision to return to UC San Diego Moores makes perfect sense given the NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center designation and access to cutting-edge clinical trials like CONVERGE-01. And your continued use of Scripps for primary care and ophthalmology reflects the practical reality that they excel in general medical services—exactly what the Healthgrades rankings actually measure.

Let me revise the article to accurately reflect this critical change:

---

What San Diego Patients Need to Know

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)

Two San Diego hospitals made Healthgrades' 2026 top 50 list—Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas and Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego—but major academic medical centers like UC San Diego Health and UCLA were notably absent. These general hospital rankings measure overall outcomes across common procedures but don't specifically assess cancer care quality. Scripps Health ended its partnership with MD Anderson Cancer Center in September 2023, removing a key differentiator in specialized oncology services. For prostate cancer patients, specialized cancer center accreditations, clinical trial access, and disease-specific outcome data provide more relevant quality indicators than general hospital rankings. UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center's NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center designation and extensive clinical trial portfolio offer advantages for complex or advanced disease that general hospital quality metrics don't capture.

Understanding Hospital Rankings vs. Cancer Care Excellence

The recent Healthgrades rankings highlighting San Diego's Scripps facilities raises an important question for prostate cancer patients: what do these rankings actually tell us about where to seek cancer treatment?

How Healthgrades Measures Quality

Healthgrades evaluated over 4,500 hospitals using 45 million Medicare claims across 31 condition and procedure categories including heart attack, stroke, pneumonia, hip replacement, and coronary bypass surgery. The methodology focuses on risk-adjusted mortality and complication rates for common medical conditions and surgical procedures. Hospitals cannot opt in or out, and cannot submit their own data—all assessments use standardized Medicare claims data from the most recent three-year period available.

This objective, data-driven approach differs significantly from U.S. News & World Report's hospital rankings, which historically combined reputation surveys with outcome data. After facing criticism and hospital withdrawals, U.S. News shifted from numerical rankings to a 20-hospital "honor roll" format in their most recent assessment.

Why Major Academic Centers May Not Appear

The absence of UC San Diego Health and UCLA from the Healthgrades top 50 doesn't indicate inferior care—it reflects what these rankings measure. Academic medical centers typically treat more complex cases, perform high-risk procedures, and accept sicker patients that community hospitals transfer out. Risk adjustment methodologies attempt to account for patient complexity, but may not fully capture the severity differences between tertiary care centers and community hospitals.

UC San Diego Health, for example, operates California's only academic medical center in San Diego County, serving as the regional referral center for the most complex cases. The facility houses a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center—a distinction held by only 57 cancer centers nationwide and representing the highest level of NCI recognition.

Similarly, UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center holds NCI Comprehensive designation and consistently ranks among the nation's top cancer programs in specialty-specific assessments.

The Scripps-MD Anderson Partnership: What Changed

When Scripps Health announced its partnership with MD Anderson Cancer Center in August 2016, the collaboration promised to bring "the best cancer treatment available anywhere" to San Diego. The five-year agreement created Scripps MD Anderson Cancer Center as part of MD Anderson's global Cancer Network, offering access to treatment protocols, clinical trials, joint tumor boards, and subspecialty expertise.

However, the partnership ended in September 2023 when both parties allowed the agreement to expire. Scripps confirmed the change but provided limited explanation, stating only that the partnership agreement reached the end of its term. The San Diego Union-Tribune noted that Scripps, like health systems nationwide, has faced increased costs not offset by reimbursement increases—a factor cited in Scripps' decision to pull medical groups from Medicare Advantage programs.

Scripps stated that "current and future cancer patients will benefit from work completed during the partnership, and Scripps' patient care will continue uninterrupted, with the same care teams at the same locations." The system now provides cancer care through Scripps Cancer Center without the MD Anderson affiliation.

What This Means for Patients

The end of the MD Anderson partnership removed several potential advantages:

• Access to MD Anderson's extensive clinical trial portfolio
• Joint tumor boards providing subspecialist input on complex cases
• Direct collaboration with MD Anderson experts
• Potential patient transfers to Houston for specialized treatments
• Faculty appointments and training opportunities for Scripps physicians

While Scripps maintains Commission on Cancer accreditation from the American College of Surgeons—demonstrating compliance with quality standards—the loss of the MD Anderson network affiliation represents a significant change in the scope of specialized resources available.

What Matters for Prostate Cancer Care

For men with prostate cancer, several factors matter more than general hospital rankings:

National Cancer Institute Designation

The NCI designates cancer centers based on scientific leadership, resources, and demonstrated depth across research, clinical care, and community outreach. Comprehensive Cancer Centers—the highest designation—must demonstrate excellence across multiple cancer types and maintain substantial research programs.

UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center achieved NCI Comprehensive designation and offers access to novel therapies often unavailable elsewhere. The center currently conducts numerous prostate cancer clinical trials, including studies of advanced radiopharmaceuticals like Actinium-225, PSMA-targeted therapies, and novel combination approaches.

Volume and Specialization

Research consistently demonstrates that surgical volume correlates with better outcomes for complex cancer procedures. High-volume centers typically have:

• Surgeons performing hundreds of procedures annually rather than dozens
• Multidisciplinary tumor boards reviewing every case
• Specialized pathology expertise for accurate grading
• Dedicated radiation oncology teams with advanced treatment planning capabilities
• Access to cutting-edge imaging and diagnostics

Clinical Trial Access

Academic medical centers provide access to investigational therapies through clinical trials. For advanced prostate cancer, this access can be critical. UC San Diego and UCLA both participate in national cooperative group trials and sponsor investigator-initiated studies of novel treatments.

UC San Diego's CONVERGE-01 trial investigating Actinium-225 therapy represents exactly this type of innovation—a potentially practice-changing approach available only through clinical trial participation at select academic centers.

Multidisciplinary Care Coordination

Comprehensive cancer centers provide integrated care teams including:

• Medical oncologists specializing in genitourinary cancers
• Radiation oncologists with prostate cancer expertise
• Urologic surgeons trained in minimally invasive and robotic techniques
• Specialized pathologists
• Genetic counselors
• Clinical trial coordinators
• Supportive care services

San Diego's Prostate Cancer Care Landscape

Scripps Health System

Both Scripps facilities in the Healthgrades top 50—Memorial Hospital Encinitas and Mercy Hospital San Diego—offer urology services and prostate cancer treatment through Scripps Cancer Center. The system maintains Commission on Cancer accreditation and provides robotic surgery, advanced radiation therapy including intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) and stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT), and medical oncology services.

However, without the MD Anderson partnership, clinical trial access and subspecialty expertise may be more limited than during the collaboration period. Patients seeking cutting-edge therapies or second opinions on complex cases may need to look to academic medical centers.

UC San Diego Health

UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center provides:

• NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center designation
• Extensive clinical trial portfolio for all disease stages
• Specialized genitourinary oncology team
• Advanced imaging including PSMA PET/CT
• Radiopharmaceutical therapy programs (FDA-approved and investigational)
• Genomic profiling and precision medicine approaches

The center's research programs have contributed to FDA approvals of novel therapies and published extensively in leading medical journals. For patients with advanced or complex disease, the depth of subspecialty expertise and access to investigational therapies can provide treatment options unavailable at community cancer programs.

Geographic Access and Care Coordination

San Diego County benefits from having both highly-ranked community hospitals and a major academic medical center, but patients often use both systems strategically—academic centers for specialized cancer care while maintaining relationships with community providers for primary care and other medical needs.

The Healthgrades analysis found that 46% of Americans live more than 25 miles from a top 250 hospital, with 14 states lacking any top 5% facility. San Diego patients are fortunate to have choices, allowing decisions based on disease complexity and individual circumstances rather than geographic necessity.

Making Informed Treatment Decisions

Prostate cancer patients should consider:

For Newly Diagnosed Localized Disease:

• Surgeon or radiation oncologist experience and volume
• Access to active surveillance programs for appropriate candidates
• Quality of life outcomes and side effect management
• Patient satisfaction and communication
• Convenience and care coordination with existing providers

For Advanced or Recurrent Disease:

• Genitourinary oncology specialization
• Clinical trial availability
• Access to novel imaging (PSMA PET/CT)
• Radiopharmaceutical therapy programs (Pluvicto, investigational agents)
• Multidisciplinary tumor board review
• Subspecialty pathology expertise

Questions to Ask:

• How many prostate cancer patients does this team treat annually?
• What clinical trials are available for my disease stage?
• How does the team coordinate care between specialties?
• What imaging and molecular testing capabilities are available?
• What is your experience with the specific treatment being recommended?
• For complex cases: Is my case reviewed by a multidisciplinary tumor board?

The Bottom Line

General hospital rankings provide useful information about overall quality and safety, but don't tell the complete story for cancer care. The Healthgrades recognition of Scripps facilities reflects excellence in the common medical and surgical conditions that most patients experience—making them strong choices for primary care, routine procedures, and general medical needs.

However, cancer care—particularly for advanced or complex disease—requires different evaluation criteria. The end of the Scripps-MD Anderson partnership represents a significant change in San Diego's oncology landscape, removing a network connection that previously provided access to expanded clinical trials and subspecialty expertise.

For prostate cancer patients, the choice of treatment facility should align with disease complexity:

• Localized, favorable-risk disease: Excellent outcomes can be achieved at multiple San Diego facilities with experienced providers
• High-risk, recurrent, or metastatic disease: The specialized resources, clinical trial access, and subspecialty expertise at NCI-designated centers like UC San Diego Moores may provide meaningful advantages
• Routine medical care: Community hospitals ranked highly for general quality metrics excel at primary care, preventive services, and routine medical needs

The most important factor isn't where a hospital ranks on a general quality list—it's finding a team with deep prostate cancer expertise who will partner with you in making informed decisions about your care. Many San Diego patients successfully navigate care across both systems, using academic medical centers for specialized cancer treatment while maintaining relationships with community providers for other healthcare needs.

---

SIDEBAR: How Electronic Health Records Transformed Patient Care Coordination

Remember When Getting Your Records Was a Production?

For patients navigating care across multiple healthcare systems just 15-20 years ago, obtaining and sharing medical records was a logistical challenge that could significantly delay treatment and compromise care quality. The transformation to today's seamless electronic health record sharing represents one of healthcare's most significant advances—though like most technological revolutions, it has brought both remarkable benefits and unexpected trade-offs.

The Paper Records Era

Before widespread electronic health record (EHR) adoption, a patient receiving care at both Scripps and UC San Diego Health would face a cumbersome process:

1. Request forms and fees: Submit written requests to medical records departments, often with notarized signatures. Fees could be substantial—sometimes $50-100 for a complete record.

2. Waiting periods: Medical records departments typically required 7-14 days to fulfill requests, sometimes longer for older records stored off-site.

3. Physical transfer: Records arrived as photocopies via mail. Patients physically carried manila envelopes between appointments or had records faxed (often with poor quality).

4. Incomplete information: Faxed records were frequently illegible. Lab values, imaging reports, and consultation notes might be missing or arrive separately.

5. Coordination burden: The patient bore complete responsibility for ensuring each physician had relevant information from other providers.

6. Duplicate testing: Without access to recent lab work or imaging, physicians often re-ordered tests already performed elsewhere—increasing costs, radiation exposure, and delays in treatment decisions.

For patients with complex conditions like advanced prostate cancer requiring coordination between oncology, urology, radiation oncology, and potentially multiple specialists, this system was not just inefficient—it could be dangerous. Critical information about treatment responses, medication adjustments, or complications might not reach the right physician in time to inform urgent decisions.

The HITECH Act Revolution

The 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, fundamentally changed healthcare information technology. The federal government allocated over $35 billion to:

• Incentivize adoption of certified electronic health record systems
• Establish "meaningful use" criteria requiring EHRs to actually improve care, not just digitize paper
• Strengthen HIPAA privacy protections for electronic health information
• Promote health information exchange between different systems
• Give patients the right to obtain their records in electronic format

The "meaningful use" program provided financial incentives to physicians and hospitals that adopted certified EHR technology and demonstrated specific capabilities:

• Stage 1 (2011): Electronic data capture and sharing
• Stage 2 (2014): Advanced clinical processes including patient access to records
• Stage 3 (2017): Improved outcomes through decision support and patient engagement

How San Diego Built Interoperability

San Diego developed a particularly sophisticated health information exchange infrastructure through two complementary systems:

San Diego Health Connect: A regional health information exchange connecting San Diego's major health systems, launched over a decade ago. The nonprofit organization:

• Connects 3.2 million patient records across different health systems
• Links Scripps, UC San Diego Health, Sharp, Kaiser, and other providers
• Achieved 95% patient matching accuracy through standardized demographic data
• Provides automated alerts when patients receive emergency care at different facilities
• Supports public health reporting for communicable diseases and immunizations

Epic Care Everywhere: Epic Systems' built-in health information exchange platform, used by both UC San Diego Health and many other health systems nationwide:

• Exchanges over 220 million patient records monthly
• Connects Epic users with non-Epic systems using standardized formats
• Allows real-time queries when patients present for care
• Half of all exchanges occur between Epic and other EHR platforms

What This Means for Patient Care Today

For a patient receiving care at both Scripps and UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center:

Automatic record sharing: When you see your oncologist at UC San Diego, they can instantly query Scripps systems to view:

• Recent lab results from your primary care physician
• Ophthalmology visit notes and testing
• Medication lists updated by any provider
• Imaging reports and diagnostic studies

Real-time updates: Changes made by one physician are immediately visible to others—medication adjustments, new diagnoses, treatment plans all propagate across systems.

Reduced redundancy: Providers see tests already performed, avoiding duplicate imaging or lab work unless clinically necessary.

Enhanced safety: Drug interaction checking works across all prescribers. Allergy information updates immediately systemwide.

Emergency access: If you were to present at a Scripps emergency department, physicians would immediately see your UC San Diego cancer treatment history, current medications, and recent test results—critical for safe emergency care.

Patient control: Through patient portals (MyChart at UC San Diego, MyScripps), you can view records from both systems, download information, and even direct records to other providers or family members.

The Medicare Advantage

Being in Original Medicare makes cross-system coordination work "like one system." Medicare Advantage plans often create network restrictions that can interfere with seamless information sharing. With Original Medicare:

• No prior authorization barriers limiting which specialists you can see
• No network restrictions preventing care coordination
• All participating providers accept the same insurance
• Focus can remain on finding the best expertise rather than navigating plan networks

The Trade-Offs: What We Lost Along the Way

While EHR systems enabled unprecedented information sharing and care coordination, the transformation came with significant costs to the physician-patient relationship:

Screen time vs. face time: Perhaps the most profound change has been the shift in physician attention during appointments. Where physicians once maintained eye contact while taking handwritten notes, they now spend much of the visit facing a computer screen, navigating through multiple tabs and dropdown menus to document the encounter. The EHR has, in many ways, become a third party in the examination room.

Studies have documented that physicians can spend 50% or more of appointment time on EHR documentation, with eyes on the screen rather than on the patient. The intensive data entry requirements—driven partly by billing needs, quality metrics, and liability concerns—can make patients feel less heard and physicians more rushed. The human connection that is central to effective healthcare can suffer when technology mediates the interaction so completely.

Documentation burden: Physicians frequently report that EHR systems increased their workload rather than reducing it. The promise of efficiency has often translated into expectations for more detailed documentation, more checkbox completion, and more time spent on administrative tasks. Many physicians now spend hours after clinic completing notes—a phenomenon known as "pajama time" when work follows them home.

The accessibility paradox: While patients now have unprecedented access to their own medical records through patient portals, the information is often presented in ways that are difficult for patients to understand. Lab reports arrive with numerical values but no context about what they mean or whether they're concerning. Radiology reports contain technical terminology that assumes medical training. Pathology results use specialized classification systems that require interpretation.

Clinical notes written primarily for other physicians and for billing purposes may include terminology, abbreviations, and coding that mystify rather than inform patients. A patient reviewing their records might see "mCRPC with PSA 45.3, PSADT 2.1 months, considering 225Ac-PSMA therapy vs rechallenge with novel AR inhibitor" without understanding the urgency or implications conveyed to the oncology team.

The AI interpretation temptation—and its serious privacy risks: This incomprehensibility has led many patients to turn to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or other assistants to help translate their medical records into plain language. While these tools can be remarkably helpful at explaining medical jargon, using them creates a serious privacy problem that most patients don't fully understand.

CRITICAL PRIVACY WARNING: The HIPAA Problem with AI Tools

The Trade-Off You're Making

When patients upload their medical records, lab results, or imaging reports to general-purpose AI tools to get help understanding them, they're making a privacy trade-off that deserves careful consideration.

What HIPAA Actually Protects

HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulates how healthcare providers, health plans, and their business associates handle Protected Health Information (PHI). Importantly, HIPAA does NOT regulate what patients do with their own information. Patients have the legal right under HIPAA to access their medical records and can choose to share that information with anyone they wish—family members, researchers, or AI companies.

You're not violating HIPAA by uploading your own records. The problem is different and more subtle.

The Real Risk: Leaving the Protected Zone

Once you upload your medical information to a non-HIPAA-compliant AI tool, you permanently lose all HIPAA privacy protections for that information:

1. No Business Associate Agreement: Most consumer AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude for general consumers, Gemini, etc.) do not sign Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with individual users. Without a BAA, these companies are not bound by HIPAA's privacy and security requirements for your data.

2. Data retention and use: While policies vary by company:

   • Some AI tools retain conversation data indefinitely unless you manually delete it
   • Data may be used to train AI models (though some companies now allow opt-out)
   • Information might be retained for 30 days or longer for "abuse monitoring"
   • You have no guarantee about how securely the data is stored or who might access it
   • The company's privacy policy—not HIPAA—governs how your information is handled

3. No recourse: If your health information is breached, misused, or disclosed from an AI company's systems, you have no HIPAA protection or enforcement mechanism. You're relying entirely on the company's terms of service and general privacy laws.

4. Irreversible disclosure: Once you've shared detailed medical information with an AI system, you cannot un-share it, even if you delete the conversation from your account. You don't know what copies exist in backups or logs.

What Information Is at Risk?

When you upload medical records to get help understanding them, you're typically sharing:

• Your name and date of birth
• Detailed medical diagnoses
• Lab values and test results
• Medication lists
• Physician names and specialties
• Treatment histories
• Genetic information
• Imaging findings

This is exactly the kind of Protected Health Information that HIPAA was designed to protect when handled by healthcare providers. When it leaves the healthcare system's secure environment and enters a commercial AI system, those protections evaporate.

The De-Identification Dilemma

You might think, "I'll just remove my name before uploading." But truly de-identifying medical records is extremely difficult:

• Dates of service combined with rare conditions can identify individuals
• Combinations of age, location, and diagnosis can be uniquely identifying
• Even "de-identified" data can often be re-identified when combined with other publicly available information
• A study involving Facebook showed that de-identified health records could be matched with social media profiles to create comprehensive digital health profiles

HIPAA-Compliant Alternatives

Some healthcare-specific AI tools ARE HIPAA-compliant because they sign Business Associate Agreements:

• Google's Med-PaLM 2: Designed for healthcare organizations, includes BAA
• Healthcare system patient portals: Some now include AI interpretation features built into the secure portal
• Physician-authorized tools: Some medical practices use HIPAA-compliant AI within their EHR systems

These tools operate under HIPAA's privacy and security requirements, giving you legal protections for your information.

The Practical Dilemma

This creates a genuine problem for patients:

• Medical information IS often incomprehensible without help
• Physicians often don't have time to thoroughly explain every result
• The desire to understand your own health information is legitimate and important
• AI tools ARE remarkably helpful at translating medical jargon into plain language
• Yet using them may expose your most sensitive personal information to companies with no legal obligation to protect it

Harm Reduction Strategies

If you choose to use non-HIPAA-compliant AI tools to understand medical records despite these risks, consider:

1. Minimize identifiable information: Remove names, dates of birth, medical record numbers, physician names, specific dates (use "recent" or "2 months ago" instead)

2. Use general queries: Instead of uploading full reports, ask general questions: "What does a PSA of 45 typically mean?" rather than uploading your complete lab report with your name and medical history

3. Screenshot editing: Redact identifying information before uploading images of reports

4. Understand the trade-off: You're trading privacy risk for comprehension help—make that choice knowingly and deliberately

5. Delete conversations: Most AI tools allow you to delete conversation history—use this feature immediately after getting your answer, though it may not remove data from all backups

6. Check privacy policies: Some AI tools have better privacy protections than others—read them

7. Avoid genetic information: Be especially cautious with genetic test results, which are uniquely identifying and have implications for family members

The Bigger Picture

This situation highlights a fundamental gap in healthcare: patients have a legal right to access their medical records, but healthcare systems often fail to provide those records in a form that patients can actually understand. The ideal solution isn't patients uploading sensitive data to commercial AI systems—it's healthcare systems providing:

• Plain-language reports generated at the source
• HIPAA-compliant AI interpretation tools integrated into patient portals
• Better physician time for explanation and questions
• Patient education materials that actually explain what tests mean
• Medical literacy support as a standard part of care

Until healthcare systems close this gap, patients face an uncomfortable choice between understanding their health information and protecting their privacy. There's no perfect answer, but patients should at least make this choice with full awareness of what they're risking.

Remaining Challenges in EHR Interoperability

Despite enormous progress in record sharing, other challenges persist:

• Data presentation: Information from outside systems may appear differently than native records
• Imaging access: While reports transfer easily, actual images (CT scans, MRIs) may require separate systems
• Specialty data: Genomic testing, advanced pathology, and research data may not transfer through standard exchanges
• Patient consent: Privacy protections mean patients can opt out of information sharing (though this rarely benefits care)
• Cognitive overload: Physicians face screens full of data from multiple sources, making it harder to synthesize the narrative of a patient's journey

Why This Matters for Cancer Care

For complex diseases like advanced prostate cancer, seamless information sharing enables:

• Multidisciplinary care: Oncologists, urologists, and radiation oncologists all work from the same information
• Clinical trials: Research coordinators can access complete medical histories
• Precision medicine: Molecular testing results inform treatment across all providers
• Continuity: When treatment moves between settings (outpatient clinic to infusion center to hospital), information follows immediately

Looking Forward

The next frontier includes:

• Improved user interfaces: EHR systems designed to support physician-patient interaction rather than impede it
• Ambient documentation: AI listening tools that can generate notes from natural conversation, freeing physicians from keyboard time
• Patient-friendly reporting: Lab and imaging results automatically translated into understandable language within the secure healthcare environment
• Standardized exchange of genomic data
• Integration of social determinants of health information
• Interoperability with wearable devices and home monitoring

The Bottom Line

The transformation from paper records to interconnected electronic systems represents both a triumph and a cautionary tale. We've achieved remarkable improvements in care coordination, patient safety, and information accessibility—capabilities that were simply impossible two decades ago. Patients managing complex conditions across multiple providers now benefit from a level of coordination that can directly improve outcomes.

Yet we've also lost something valuable: the undivided attention of the physician, the eye contact that conveys empathy and builds trust, and the simple human connection that has always been central to healing. We've gained access to our medical records but often can't understand them without help—and seeking that help through commercial AI tools may compromise the very privacy protections that HIPAA was designed to provide.

The best path forward isn't to abandon EHR technology—its benefits are too substantial—but to continue evolving how we implement it. The goal should be technology that serves the physician-patient relationship rather than dominating it, documentation systems that capture what matters without drowning clinicians in checkbox bureaucracy, information presentation that empowers rather than confuses patients, and privacy-protected tools for helping patients understand their own health information.

We're making progress on all these fronts, but there's clearly work remaining. For now, patients have learned to adapt: recognizing when physicians make the effort to maintain eye contact despite screen demands, carefully weighing the privacy trade-offs of using AI to decode records, and appreciating that the information seamlessly flowing between their care teams—even if it comes at the cost of some face time and requires navigating new privacy considerations—may literally be saving their lives.

---

Sources:

1. San Diego Health Connect. "About San Diego Health Connect." https://sdhealthconnect.org/

2. UC San Diego Health. "Health Information Exchange." https://health.ucsd.edu/patients/medical-records/health-information-exchange/

3. Epic Systems. "Interoperability | Epic." https://www.epic.com/software/interoperability/

4. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. "THE HITECH ACT: An Overview." Journal of Ethics, American Medical Association, March 2011. https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/hitech-act-overview/2011-03

5. HIPAA Journal. "What is the HITECH Act? 2026 Update." https://www.hipaajournal.com/what-is-the-hitech-act/

6. Healthcare IT News. "Epic's Care Everywhere interoperability platform shows big jump in data exchange." https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/epics-care-everywhere-interoperability-platform-shows-big-jump-data-exchange

7. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. "San Diego Health Connect Takes a Big LEAP Over the Barrier of Consent Management." Health IT Buzz, April 2022. https://www.healthit.gov/buzz-blog/health-it/san-diego-health-connect-takes-big-leap-over-barrier-consent-management

8. HIPAA Journal. "Is ChatGPT HIPAA Compliant? Updated for 2025." May 2025. https://www.hipaajournal.com/is-chatgpt-hipaa-compliant/

9. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. "Individuals' Right under HIPAA to Access their Health Information." https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/access/index.html

10. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. "AI Chatbots and Challenges of HIPAA Compliance for AI Developers and Vendors." PMC, 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10937180/

 

---

Verified Sources and Citations

1. Healthgrades. "America's Best Hospitals 2026." Healthgrades, 2026. https://www.healthgrades.com/quality/americas-best-hospitals

2. Fiore, Kristina. "The 50 Best Hospitals in the U.S., According to Healthgrades." MedPage Today, 27 January 2026. https://www.medpagetoday.com/hospital-based-medicine/general-hospital-practice/

3. Garrick, David. "Scripps Health no longer partnering with MD Anderson Cancer Center." San Diego Union-Tribune, 27 October 2023. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/story/2023-10-27/scripps-health-md-anderson-cancer-center

4. Scripps Health. "Note to Patients: Scripps no longer has a formal partnership with MD Anderson Cancer Center." Scripps Health, accessed January 2026. https://www.scripps.org/news_items/6971-unique-cancer-care-collaboration-at-scripps-md-anderson-makes-headlines

5. U.S. News & World Report. "Best Hospitals 2024-2025." U.S. News & World Report, 2024. https://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals

6. National Cancer Institute. "NCI-Designated Cancer Centers." National Institutes of Health. https://www.cancer.gov/research/infrastructure/cancer-centers

7. UC San Diego Health. "Moores Cancer Center - NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center." UC San Diego Health. https://health.ucsd.edu/specialties/cancer/

8. UCLA Health. "UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center." UCLA Health. https://www.uclahealth.org/jonsson-comprehensive-cancer-center

9. MD Anderson Cancer Center. "Scripps Health and MD Anderson Cancer Center Announce Partnership to Create Clinically Integrated Cancer Program." MD Anderson Cancer Center, 29 August 2016. https://www.mdanderson.org/newsroom/scripps-health-and-m.h00-159068712.html

10. Birkmeyer JD, et al. "Hospital Volume and Surgical Mortality in the United States." New England Journal of Medicine 2002; 346:1128-1137. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa012337

11. National Comprehensive Cancer Network. "NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology: Prostate Cancer." NCCN, Version 1.2026. https://www.nccn.org/professionals/physician_gls/pdf/prostate.pdf

12. American College of Surgeons. "Commission on Cancer Accreditation." American College of Surgeons. https://www.facs.org/quality-programs/cancer-programs/commission-on-cancer/

---

Note: This article is intended for educational purposes and should not replace consultation with qualified healthcare providers. Treatment decisions should be made in consultation with your medical team based on your individual circumstances.

s.