In the summer of 2025, something quietly historic happened in American medicine. U.S. News & World Report published its annual rankings of the best hospitals in the country for cardiology, heart surgery, and vascular care — and for the first time in six years, the top spot did not belong to the Cleveland Clinic. It belonged to New York City.
NYU Langone Hospitals claimed the number one ranking nationally. Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital took number two. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell landed at number five. Three institutions in one city, occupying three of the top five positions in the country for cardiac care. And that is not even counting the dozens of other nationally recognized programs spread across the five boroughs and the surrounding metropolitan area.
To understand how New York got here — and what it means for patients — you have to go back further than last summer’s rankings. You have to understand what has been quietly built, discovered, and pioneered along the banks of the East River and the Hudson over the better part of a century.
The Weight of What Happened Here
The history of cardiac surgery in New York is not a footnote to American medicine. In many ways, it is American medicine.
In 1956, surgeons at what is now NewYork-Presbyterian performed the first open-heart operation on a child with a congenital heart defect. In 1984, the same institution performed the world’s first successful pediatric heart transplant. In 2001, they performed the world’s first totally endoscopic, robotic open-heart surgery. And over the intervening decades, NewYork-Presbyterian’s program helped develop and refine transcatheter aortic valve replacement — known as TAVR — the technique that has largely replaced open-heart surgery for aortic stenosis and is now a global standard of care. More than 2,200 open-heart surgeries are performed there every year. The hospital’s heart transplant program holds the record for the most transplants performed of any center in the world.
In 2025, the innovations continued. Physicians and researchers from Columbia and Weill Cornell Medicine performed one of the first split-root domino partial heart transplants, pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to identify structural heart disease on electrocardiogram readings with greater accuracy than cardiologists, and launched new research into GLP-1 medications — the class of drugs best known for weight loss — and their potential to protect the hearts of patients with heart failure. Each of these threads, examined individually, would represent a significant moment at any institution. At NewYork-Presbyterian, they were a single year’s update.
The Man Who Built a Heart Hospital
When Mount Sinai’s cardiovascular program is discussed, one name surfaces with a gravitational inevitability: Valentin Fuster.
Born in Spain, trained in Barcelona, Harvard, and the Mayo Clinic, Fuster arrived at Mount Sinai in 1994 as Director of the Cardiovascular Institute. Over the following three decades, he transformed what was already a strong program into one of the four best cardiac centers in the world. He served as President of the American Heart Association, President of the World Heart Federation, and Editor-in-Chief of two of cardiology’s most important journals. In 2022, the American College of Cardiology created a named annual award — the Valentin Fuster Award for Innovation in Science — given in his honor. In 2023, Mount Sinai formalized what had long been understood: the hospital renamed its heart program the Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital.
For the 2025–2026 rankings, that program holds the number two position in the United States for cardiology, heart, and vascular surgery. In April 2026, it launched the Adams Valve Institute, a new center specializing in complex valve surgery and valvular heart disease — a reflection of how specialized and technically demanding leading cardiac care has become. The world’s most complex heart cases no longer just arrive at these institutions; in many instances, they cannot be treated anywhere else.
NYU Langone: When Research Becomes Ranked Number One
The climb to number one in cardiology did not happen suddenly at NYU Langone. It happened through the long, patient accumulation of something its cardiology director, Glenn Fishman, described as “decades of collaboration across specialties — where research, innovation and patient care are deeply interconnected.”
NYU Langone’s cardiac surgery division pioneered many of the minimally invasive techniques now used routinely across the country. Its interventional cardiologists are at the frontier of catheter-based treatments for coronary artery disease, peripheral artery disease, and heart valve conditions. Researchers there are investigating how tissue-based heart valves wear out differently in younger patients, a question with enormous practical implications as the population receiving these valves skews increasingly younger. And at the 2026 American College of Cardiology conference, NYU Langone researchers presented findings suggesting that cardiac amyloidosis — a dangerous infiltration of abnormal proteins into heart tissue — may be present even when routine testing doesn’t flag it.
The numbers that earned NYU Langone the top spot were not just about research reputation. They were built on outcomes: survival rates after admission, the frequency with which complex cardiac patients were discharged directly home rather than to additional care facilities, nurse staffing levels, and patient experience scores. In a rankings methodology that placed a new, greater emphasis on actual outcomes for the 2025–2026 edition, NYU Langone’s results spoke for themselves.
What This Means If It’s Your Heart
Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States. For anyone diagnosed with a serious cardiac condition — an aortic aneurysm, a failing valve, a deteriorating heart muscle, a dangerous arrhythmia — the question of where to seek care is not abstract. It is, with some regularity, the difference between outcomes.
New York’s concentration of elite cardiac programs means something tangible for patients. It means second opinions are accessible. It means the volume of cases handled by these institutions translates into surgical experience that lowers complication rates. It means that when a case is too complex — the kind that arrives on a jet from another country because no one else has attempted it — there is a team here that has seen something close to it before.
The rankings will shift again next year. Institutions will trade places. But the underlying reality that has made New York City the country’s center of gravity for cardiac care will not. It was built over decades, procedure by procedure, discovery by discovery, in hospitals that never stopped asking what the next thing was — and then going and finding it.