Ranking hospitals is always a fraught exercise in that some ratings rely heavily on subjective patient experiences or long-standing reputations, while others don’t fully grasp the particulars of a hospital’s patient population (income, social determinants, etc.), while other rankings simply don’t reveal how they arrived at their best-of lists.

But many rankings do use a variety of accepted metrics, which when used in conjunction with a patient’s consultation with their physician and other research, can provide a good basis for choosing a care facility. And no matter what source is used to rank hospitals, the fact remains that Massachusetts hospitals consistently rise to the top of many lists – whether it be ones produced by U.S. News & World Report, Leapfrog, or as occurred this week, Newsweek.

Newsweek partnered with statista, a German-based data gathering company to rank hospitals in 32 countries to determine the “best in the world.”

That heady declaration, according to Newsweek, is based on four data sources: recommendations from medical experts—including doctors, hospital managers and other healthcare professionals; hospital quality metrics; existing patient experience data, and statista’s Patient-Reported Outcome Measures Implementation Survey or “PROM,” which is defined as “standardized, validated questionnaires completed by patients to measure their perception of their functional well-being and quality of life.”

Four Massachusetts hospitals are listed as being among the world’s best. Fourteen are listed as being tops in the U.S.