The best judge of a hospital is another doctor
By David Haigh, chairman and chief executive, Brand Finance
Every hospital has a customer that public-facing advertising rarely considers: the doctor down the road. General practitioners decide where to send a complicated case. Specialists advise colleagues on where to send a relative. Final-year students choose a residency. Researchers choose a collaborator. Few of them make decisions based on a public billboard. But all of them make decisions that determine which institutions grow, which attract talent and which quietly lose both.
For four years, Brand Finance has asked medical professionals what they think. The 2026 Global Top 250 Hospitals study surveyed more than 2,500 health-care professionals across 30 countries. Respondents rated both local and global academic medical centres (AMCs) on the three things that AMCs exist to do: treat patients, conduct research and train the next generation. They were also asked whether they would recommend the institutions they rated, and Brand Finance identified which of 23 attributes influence those recommendations.
The findings may surprise hospital marketing leaders.
The strongest driver of a clinician's willingness to recommend a hospital, whether for treatment, research or training, is whether it is "an organisation that medical professionals are proud to have trained or worked at". Second, is whether it attracts the best medical students. Third, is the quality of its training programme. Together, these three account for 30% of the overall influence on professional recommendations. Fourth, at 8%, is whether care, research and teaching are integrated rather than run as separate businesses under one roof.
The profession, in other words, judges a hospital by the people it produces.
of the influence on professional recommendations come from three key factors.
01 — A source of professional pride
An organisation that medical professionals are proud to have trained at or worked for.
02 — Attracting top medical students
The ability to attract the best medical students.
03 — High-quality training
The quality of the training programme.
Beyond AI and name recognition
What does not move the profession is more instructive still. Whether a hospital “uses and applies artificial intelligence” ranks last of the 23 attributes, at 0.7% of total importance, and its relative importance declined from the previous year. Johns Hopkins Medicine, the world's strongest hospital brand for the second year running, ranks 143rd of the 250 on perceived use of AI. AI may yet transform medicine, but a hospital's peers do not currently treat it as evidence of excellence.
Visibility is not reputation. The study measures both: how widely a hospital is known and how it is regarded by those who know it. Among the top 100 hospitals, international familiarity has no positive relationship with peer recommendation at all. Familiarity among local clinicians does. The hospitals that doctors most readily recommend are the ones doctors actually know.
That produces a map of medical excellence that looks different from the one that other league tables draw. Six of our top 20 AMCs are outside North America and Europe, led by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi at sixth, Singapore General Hospital at tenth and King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh at 12th, up from 20th two years ago.
Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires has the second-highest reputation score of all 250 among clinicians who know it, behind only Johns Hopkins, but it has a fraction of the international profile. Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town is first in the world for teaching and for attracting the top medical students. South American hospitals as a group have the highest average reputation and recommendation scores of any region, yet the second-lowest international familiarity. South American hospital reputations are concentrated in their home markets, whereas those of North American and Asia-Pacific hospitals are more evenly balanced between domestic and international markets.
A chief executive who wants a stronger brand should start with the head of medical education, not the marketing agency.
Building a stronger reputation
Those who run hospitals need to take three actions.
First, put talent at the centre of brand strategy. The attributes that drive professional recommendations are the attributes of a great teaching institution: the quality of its trainees, the pride of its alumni and the integration of its missions. A chief executive who wants a stronger brand should start with the head of medical education, not the marketing agency.
Second, measure the audience that matters. Patient satisfaction and public awareness are worth tracking, but the referral, the residency application and the research collaboration are decided by professionals. A hospital that does not know what its peers think of it is flying blind.
Third, treat reputation as an asset. The strongest hospital brands in our study are remarkably stable: eight of this year's top ten were in last year's. Professional reputation compounds slowly and, once built, is hard to dislodge. Your board needs to manage that asset carefully.
These findings suggest that referral letters matter more than billboards. Building a hospital brand is less about fancy machinery or loud marketing campaigns than about creating a place where the best people are proud to have trained.
David Haigh is chairman and chief executive of Brand Finance, the world's leading independent brand valuation consultancy, which publishes the annual Global Top 250 Hospitals study.
To learn more about Brand Finance, visit:
