Brookings Health Recognized as a Top 20 Rural Community Hospital for the Eighth Time

Brookings Health System was again named a Top 20 Rural Community Hospital in the United States by the National Rural Health Association (NRHA). The health system ranked 99.9 percent on the winter 2025 Chartis Rural Hospital Performance INDEX, the tool used to recognize the Top 20. Brookings Health was the highest scoring rural prospective payment system (PPS) hospital among peer rural and community hospitals across the nation.

“Our team is the key driver to our continued success year-after-year,” said President and CEO Jason Merkley. “Their focus to provide world-class care with the best possible outcomes to every patient, every time drives the high-quality, compassionate, personalized health care our community has come to know and trust.”

This is the eighth time since the award was established in 2016 that the NRHA has named Brookings Health to the elite Top 20 list. The health system will be recognized at an awards ceremony during NRHA’s Rural Hospital Innovation Summit on May 22 in Atlanta, GA. 

The NRHA honors the 20 highest-ranked PPS hospitals in the country based on an evaluation by the Chartis Rural Hospital Performance INDEX®. The INDEX is based entirely on publicly available data sets and is the industry’s most comprehensive and objective assessment of rural provider performance. It benchmarks rural and community hospitals on eight pillars of performance: inpatient market share, outpatient market share, quality, outcomes, patient perspective, cost, charge, and financial efficiency. More information about the Top 20 list can be found on ruralhealth.us. 

Brookings Health was also recently named to Newsweek’s World’s Best Hospitals as well as a Top 100 Rural and Community Hospital. To learn more about Brookings Health System’s high-quality care, please visit brookingshealth.org/Quality.