Five outside rating systems. That is how many Becker’s Hospital Review names in its recognition FAQ as inputs for its more competitive lists: U.S. News, Healthgrades, Newsweek, CMS star ratings, and Leapfrog. The same FAQ says the identity of the person who submits a nomination isn’t considered at all.
That one detail tells you how the publication works. Becker’s is less interested in who you know than in whether the evidence is in front of its editors in a form they can use quickly. It publishes a large volume of short, scannable pieces for hospital and health system leaders, and it rewards submissions that are easy to verify and easy to drop into a story or a list.
If you know which of its formats you are aiming for, getting in is more about preparation than pitching. Here is how each one works.
What Becker’s Hospital Review is
Becker’s Hospital Review is the flagship of Becker’s Healthcare, a Chicago-based publisher that also runs titles covering ambulatory surgery centers, health IT, payers, spine, behavioral health, and dental and DSO businesses, along with a busy calendar of conferences and virtual events.
Its audience is hospital and health system leadership: CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, chief nursing officers, chief medical officers, and the people who report to them. Much of its reach comes through free email newsletters, which is why so many executives scan it daily. The reading experience is quick. Many articles are a few hundred words, organized as lists, roundups, or short news briefs.
That format shapes what earns a spot. A long feature pitch rarely fits. A crisp, verifiable fact, a clear quote from an executive, or a well-documented nomination fits easily.
The three formats that get you in
Most Becker’s coverage of people and organizations falls into one of three formats. I call matching your goal to one of them the Three-Format Fit, and it is the first decision to make before you send anything.
The first format is the list. Becker’s publishes recognition lists throughout the year, including hospital lists such as great hospitals and great community hospitals, and executive lists such as CFOs, CIOs, and women leaders to know. These are the most visible route for health systems and their leaders.
The second format is the executive voice piece. Becker’s often asks hospital and health system leaders to answer a specific question, then publishes the answers as a roundup or a Q&A. These pieces are how individual executives build name recognition in the publication.
The third format is the news brief. Leadership changes, affiliations and mergers, service line openings and closures, financial results, layoffs, and major technology rollouts at named health systems all become short news items.
Notice that vendors appear in all three formats only through health systems. A vendor gets into a news brief when a named hospital adopts its technology and the result matters. A vendor executive rarely appears on a hospital leadership list. If you sell to hospitals, your path into Becker’s editorial coverage usually runs through your customers.
How to win a spot on a Becker’s list
Lists are the format with the clearest rules, and Becker’s spells many of them out in its recognition FAQ.
Anyone can nominate, including self-nominations. Most lists focus on hospital and health system executives unless a list is explicitly open to all healthcare leaders. Submit one nomination per person or organization per list, because Becker’s says multiple submissions don’t improve the odds. You can nominate the same person or organization for different lists. To revise a nomination, submit a new one online, since the most recent submission is the one considered. Lists are generally published within a month after the nomination deadline, and Becker’s offers sign-ups for deadline updates on its lists page.
The evidence is what separates honorees from everyone else. For competitive hospital lists, Becker’s weighs outside rankings and qualitative factors such as new technologies, research, community leadership, and outcomes or patient satisfaction data. So build each nomination like an evidence file. List the specific rankings and ratings the organization holds, with the year. Name the initiatives that set it apart and give a measurable result for each. For an executive, describe scope in concrete terms, such as the number of hospitals, beds, employees, or revenue they oversee, and two or three accomplishments with dates and numbers.
Write the nomination so an editor could lift a sentence straight into a profile. Becker’s list entries are short. If your strongest point is buried in paragraph four, it won’t make it.
Put the deadlines on a calendar a year ahead. Many lists recur on a predictable cycle, and the organizations that appear year after year are often the ones that submit every cycle with updated evidence.
How to get an executive quoted
For executive voice pieces, the goal is to be the leader Becker’s editors think of when they need an answer to a timely question, and to make answering easy.
Start by reading the publication for a few weeks and noting the questions it asks executives. They tend to track what health system leaders are dealing with right now: labor costs, margins, payer negotiations, AI adoption, cybersecurity, and site-of-care shifts. When Becker’s invites responses, answer promptly, answer the actual question, and keep it short and specific. Two strong paragraphs with one concrete example beat a page of general observations.
Give the answer a point of view. “We are watching AI closely” says nothing. “We stopped two AI pilots this year because neither reduced nurse documentation time, and we now require a labor metric before any pilot starts” is a quote an editor wants to run.
Make sure the executive’s name, title, and organization are presented exactly as they appear on the health system’s website. Consistency across Becker’s, the organization’s leadership page, and LinkedIn helps every reader and every search engine connect the coverage to the right person.
How to make news briefs easy to write
News briefs reward speed and completeness. When your health system has news, such as a new CEO, an affiliation, a facility opening, or a major technology rollout, send the release to Becker’s editorial team with every fact a reporter needs to write a short item without a follow-up call.
That means the full names and titles of everyone involved, effective dates, the number of beds, sites, or employees affected, the financial terms if they are public, and one quote from a senior leader that explains the why. Attach or link the official release on the organization’s newsroom.
For vendors, the brief has to be about the customer. “Health system X deploys tool Y across 12 hospitals, cutting average discharge time by a specific amount” can become a brief. “Company Y launches tool Y” usually won’t. Get the customer’s approval to name them and to share the result before you pitch.
Coverage in health system trade press also feeds what AI assistants say when executives research vendors and peers, a dynamic we cover in our guide to AEO for healthcare brands.
Editorial, sponsored, and the line between them
Becker’s, like most trade publishers, runs a commercial side alongside its newsroom. It sells advertising, sponsored content, webinars, white papers, and conference sponsorships, and those products are a legitimate way to reach hospital leaders. They are not the same as editorial coverage, and readers can usually tell the difference from the labels.
The mistake I see is companies blurring the two in their own heads. A vendor buys a sponsored webinar, then expects the newsroom to cover its next product launch. Or a health system’s marketing team gets a pitch from the sales side and assumes a list spot is part of the package. Becker’s recognition FAQ describes an editorial nomination process with no fee listed, and selections that weigh outside ratings and documented results. Treat it that way.
If you have budget, decide what you are buying. Sponsored content is good for reaching a defined audience with a message you control. Editorial coverage is good for credibility, because a third party chose to include you. Both have a place. Only one of them can be earned with a better nomination or a sharper executive quote, and that is the one this guide is about.
It is also worth thinking about the long tail. Becker’s articles and lists stay online for years, and they show up in search results and AI answers when people research a health system or its leaders. A list entry from three years ago can still be the first third-party mention someone finds. That makes it worth getting names, titles, and facts exactly right in every submission, because you will live with those details for a long time.
A 90-day plan for a health system communications team
If you lead communications for a hospital or health system and want a steady presence in Becker’s, the work fits into a simple quarterly rhythm.
In the first month, build the calendar. List every Becker’s recognition program your organization or leaders could qualify for, with deadlines. Sign up for list updates. Identify two or three executives with the expertise and willingness to answer questions quickly, and agree on who approves their quotes and how fast.
In the second month, build the evidence. For each list, gather the rankings, ratings, outcomes data, and initiative results you would cite, and write a draft nomination for each. For each executive, write a short bio, a list of the topics they can speak to with authority, and two example answers to the kinds of questions Becker’s asks.
In the third month, ship. Submit nominations ahead of deadlines. Respond to executive questions within a day. Send clean, complete releases for every piece of news. Then track what ran, link to it from your newsroom and executive bios, and repeat the cycle with updated evidence.
Keep the plan modest at first. Two well-documented nominations and one responsive executive will do more than ten rushed submissions.
One example worth studying
In December 2023, Becker’s Hospital Review published a roundup of predictions from 65 healthcare executives on what health care would look like in 2026. Temple Health’s newsroom then featured the commentary from Michael A. Young, president and CEO of Temple University Health System, on its own site. It is a clean illustration of the executive voice format at work. A senior leader answered a forward-looking question with a clear view, Becker’s included it, and the health system amplified it where patients, partners, and search engines could find it. Now that 2026 has arrived, those predictions are also a reminder of why a specific, checkable view outlasts a vague one: readers can hold you to it, and the leaders who were right get remembered.