The front entrance of Evanston Hospital on Ridge Avenue. Photo: Jonathan Hillenbrand / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Evanston Hospital placed seventh on Chicago magazine’s list of top hospitals in the city and suburbs, published in December 2012. The ranking covered 97 hospitals across the six-county Chicago metropolitan area.
The hospital, at 2650 Ridge Ave., is the flagship campus of NorthShore University HealthSystem. For a suburban hospital, a top-10 finish in a field that included the region’s large downtown medical centers was a notable result, and it gave local boosters a fresh talking point at the end of a year in which health care and higher education continued to anchor Evanston’s economy.
A hospital with a long local record
Evanston Hospital dates to 1891, when it was founded during a typhoid fever outbreak. By the 1930s it had become affiliated with Northwestern University and its medical school, a relationship that has kept the hospital tied to the university’s teaching and research mission for generations. A NorthShore research building also sits on the Evanston campus.
The hospital eventually became the center of a multi-hospital system. Highland Park Hospital joined NorthShore in 2000, and Skokie Hospital followed in January 2009. That growth gave the system a string of hospitals along the lakefront suburbs north of Chicago, with Evanston as its original and largest site.
Reading a regional ranking
Regional lists such as the one Chicago publishes are different from the national hospital rankings that draw attention each summer. They compare the hospitals a patient in the metro area could realistically choose between, from academic medical centers in the city to community hospitals in the suburbs. A single number cannot capture how a hospital performs for a specific condition, and readers weighing a decision about care are usually better served by asking their own physicians.
Still, a seventh-place finish among 97 put Evanston Hospital in the top tier of the area’s hospitals as the magazine measured them, and it joined other recognition NorthShore has received in the years since the system expanded.
In later years the NorthShore name kept growing. The system merged with Edward-Elmhurst Health in January 2022 to form Endeavor Health, with Evanston Hospital remaining its best-known campus on the North Shore.
The magazine’s full list and methodology were published on its website, chicagomag.com.
Margaret Whitfield is the editor of The Evanston Edge and covers local government, development and neighborhoods.
