Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital

U.S. Navy personnel visiting with patients

In 2015–16, Rainbow ranked #3 for neonatal care, #11 for pulmonology, #8 for orthopedics, #22 for neurology, #29 for nephrology, #50 for gastroenterology, #19 for oncology, and #47 for urology in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of pediatric hospitals.[8]

As of 2020 Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital has placed nationally in 7 ranked pediatric specialties on U.S. News & World Report.

Rainbow's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) cares for more than 1,300 premature and critically ill babies each year.[10] It serves a 12-county area in Northeast Ohio with a pediatric population of nearly one million. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have designated it as a level III Neonatal Research Center – the highest available designation.[11]

The NICU is one of 21 units in the country deemed a National Research Center by the NIH. Its team of 22 NICU doctors and six neonatology fellows have authored medical textbooks and directed studies in research and clinical care of high-risk and low-birth weight babies. It admits approximately 1,000 newborns annually, and also serves as the ECMO referral center for Northeast Ohio.

In 2009 the NICU completed a renovation and expansion.[12] The 38-bed NICU now connects to a 44-bed neonatal transitional unit on the same floor, several feet away from the delivery rooms at MacDonald Women's Hospital. Improvements include more bedside privacy for parents, an increase in the number of diagnostic and imaging equipment, and the ability to provide extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) treatment without transporting the baby.

Rainbow's pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) is a 23-bed combined medical-surgical unit which cares for more than 1500 critically ill children each year.[13] An attending intensivist from the Division of Pediatric Critical Care coordinates care, in cooperation with children's primary pediatricians and medical and surgical subspecialists.