As a group, more New York hospitals appear in more of U.S. News & World Report’s upcoming “America’s Best Hospitals” specialty lists than institutions in any other city nationwide.

Ten New York City hospitals are featured in this year’s rankings to be published in the July 23 edition.

Among them, New York-Presbyterian Hospital is sixth on the magazine’s “Honor Roll” of the country’s 18 best hospitals overall. The top hospital was Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. For its 2007 rankings, the magazine screened 5,642 hospitals and medical centers, and graded 173 institutions in 16 specialties that include cancer, geriatrics, heart and heart surgery, and ophthalmology.

The Hospital for Special Surgery came in first in the orthopedics category, and Mount Sinai Medical Center is ranked third in geriatric care. New York-Presbyterian is ranked in each of the 16 specialties, and appears in the top 5 in five specialties, including gynecology, endocrinology, kidney disease, neurology and neurosurgery, and psychiatry.

The editor of U.S. News’s “America’s Best Hospitals” for 2007, Avery Comarow, attributed the presence of 10 New York institutions on the list to the prevalence of excellent universities and medical schools in the area. “There is a culture at these hospitals that amounts to a mission statement: ‘We won’t tolerate low standards and we’ll put patients first,'” he said.

Overall, Mr. Comarow said there is increasing competition among hospitals to improve patient care. “We keep raising the bar, and the hospitals that make the ranking tend to be those hospitals that set that standard,” he said. “There’s a constant upward evolution. Some of it is driven by technology, some of it is driven by the bottom line, some of it is driven by marketing, and that’s okay if the results are good for patients.”

Reached yesterday by telephone, the president and CEO of New York-Presbyterian, Herbert Pardes, said, “Well, we’re happy.” He cited the recruitment of top doctors, investments in technology, and efforts to improve comprehensive care and patient satisfaction as driving forces behind the hospital’s appearance on the magazine’s Honor Roll.

Last month, in data released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, New York-Presbyterian was the only hospital in the New York City area to rank “better than the national average” for mortality rates among heart attack patients.

“At the end of the day, I want you to be healthy and never need us,” Dr. Pardes said. “But if you do,” he said, using a music metaphor to refer to his medical staff, “I want you to have an orchestra in which every one of the instruments plays well.”

This year, Lenox Hill Hospital ranked 15th in the heart and heart surgery specialty after not featuring at all in last year’s rankings. “This underscores the ongoing commitment of our physicians and staff,” a spokeswoman for the hospital said. Lenox Hill had been listed in the heart category in 2003 and 2004.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, which has alternated in the top slot in the cancer specialty with University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in recent years, moved to the no. 2 from no. 1 last year.