Houston recognized among the best hospital cities in the nation

just what the doctor ordered

Houston, home to the largest medical center in the world, was ranked among the best cities for health care in the country. Photo by Dwight C. Andrews/Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau

As home to Texas Medical Center — the world's largest medical complex — it stands to reason that Houston ranks among the country's best cities for health care. A new study bolsters that notion, but it also points out that several health care measures in Houston need some TLC.

The study, conducted by digital health care provider Medbelle, ranks Houston as the ninth best "hospital city" in the United States. Medbelle sifted through data in three categories (health care infrastructure, quality of health care and access to health care) to develop the ranking. Within those categories, Medbelle examined factors like quality of medical education, number of hospital beds, shortage of nurses, efficiency of cancer treatment, and prevalence of mental health specialists.

"Houston is known internationally as the home of one of the best medical communities in the world," the City of Houston declares.

In the Medbelle study, Boston landed at No. 1 in the U.S.; Tokyo took the global crown. At No. 13, Dallas was the only other Texas city to earn a place on the U.S. list.

Medbelle says it compiled the ranking to highlight regional hospital "ecosystems" rather than specific hospitals. The Houston area has more than 85 hospitals.

Houston's hospital ecosystem scored 94.92 out of 100, yet sits in next-to-last place for access to health care (48.83 out of 100), Medbelle notes. Daniel Kolb, co-founder and managing director of Medbelle, says this means that while Houston enjoys one of the best medical infrastructures in the world, a relatively small percentage of people in the region can take advantage of it.

In 2018, nearly 1 in 5 residents of the Houston area (18.6 percent) lacked health insurance, the U.S. Census Bureau says. That's the highest rate of uninsured residents among the country's 25 most populous metro areas. Affordability and availability continue to exacerbate the health insurance predicament in Houston and around the country.

"The single biggest issue in health care for most Americans is that their health costs are growing much faster than their wages are," Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, says in a release. "Costs are prohibitive when workers making $25,000 a year have to shell out $7,000 a year just for their share of family premiums."

For those who can afford medical care, the Houston area boasts some of the best hospitals in the U.S. MD Anderson Cancer Center reigns as the country's top cancer hospital, for instance.

In May, The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit representing large employers in the U.S., assigned its highest grade — "A" — to these nine hospitals in the Houston area:

  • HCA Houston Healthcare (Kingwood)
  • Houston Methodist Hospital
  • Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital
  • Houston Methodist West Hospital
  • Houston Methodist Willowbrook Hospital
  • Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center
  • Memorial Hermann The Woodlands Hospital
  • Tomball Regional Medical Center
  • West Houston Medical Center

From another perspective, U.S. News & World Report ranks Houston Methodist Hospital as the best hospital in the Houston area, followed by Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, Memorial Hermann Greater Heights Hospital, Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, and Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital.

Meanwhile, Houston-area physicians hold Texas Children's Hospital West Campus in the highest regard among the region's hospitals, trailed by Houston Methodist West Hospital, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas Children's Hospital, and Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital.
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Houston leaders form coalition to boost Texas power grid with new tech

a better grid

A Houston-based coalition that launched this month aims to educate Texas officials about technology designed to shore up the state’s power grid.

The public-private Texas Reliability Coalition says it will promote utility-scale microgrid technology geared toward strengthening the resilience and reliability of the Texas power grid, particularly during extreme weather.

A utility-operated microgrid is a group of interconnected power loads and distributed energy sources that can operate in tandem with or apart from regular power grids, such as the grid run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Legislation passed in 2023 enables the use of utility-scale microgrid technology in Texas’ deregulated energy market, according to the coalition.

John Elder, executive director of the coalition, says that with the legal framework now in place, the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT need to create rules to establish the Texas marketplace for microgrid technology. The goal, he says, is to “take the Texas grid from good to great” by installing microgrid technology, improving the infrastructure, and strengthening the system — all targeted toward meeting power needs during extreme weather and amid growing demand.

Houston-based CenterPoint Energy will test the utility-scale microgrid technology being promoted by the coalition. In a January 31 filing with the Public Utility Commission, CenterPoint says microgrid technology will be featured in a $36.5 million pilot program that’ll set up an estimated three to five microgrids in the company’s service area. The pilot program is slated to last from 2026 to 2028.

In the public affairs arena, five Houston executives are leading the new reliability commission’s microgrid initiative.

Elder, one of the coalition’s founding members, is president and CEO of Houston-based Acclaim Energy. Other founders include Ember Real Estate Investment & Development, Park Eight Development, and PowerSecure. Ember and Park Eight are based in Houston. Durham, North Carolina-based PowerSecure, which produces microgrid technology, is a subsidiary of energy provider Southern Co.

Aside from Elder, members of the coalition’s board are:

  • Stewart Black, board secretary of the coalition and vice president of Acclaim Energy’s midstream division
  • Todd Burrer, president of municipal utility districts at Inframark
  • Harry Masterson, managing principal of Ember
  • Martin Narendorf, former vice president at CenterPoint Energy

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This article originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapital.

This Houston neighbor is the fastest growing wealthy suburb in America

By The Numbers

The Houston-area city of Fulshear is booming like nowhere else: It's now the No. 1 fast-growing affluent suburb in the country.

Fulshear's No. 1 status was unveiled in a new GoBankingRates' study that ranked the "30 Fastest Growing Wealthy Suburbs in America" for 2025. The report examined population changes from 2018 to 2023 among cities and towns in major U.S. metro areas with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 residents. Median household income, average home value, and a "livability score" were also calculated for each locale.

Fulshear, located 34 miles west of downtown Houston, experienced the most dramatic population increase out of all 30 cities in the report. Though the suburb only has an estimated population of 42,616 residents, that number has skyrocketed 237 percent during the five-year period.

A Fulshear resident's median income is $178,398 annually, and the average value of a home in the city comes out to $521,157, the report additionally found.

Fulshear was the second fastest growing city in America in 2023. The city's growth is further reflected by the number of new apartments that were built in the area in 2024.

Texas is tops
Texas cities took the top three fastest growing U.S. suburbs for 2025, with Dallas-area cities of Celina (No. 2) and Prosper (No. 3) experiencing wildly different (yet still sky high) population changes. Celina's population ballooned 190 percent to 43,317 residents, while Prosper's grew 81 percent to an estimated 41,660 people.

Other Texas cities that earned spots in the report include Flower Mound (No. 19), Southlake (No. 27), University Park (No. 28) and Colleyville (No. 29), all in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

"The old adage that everything is bigger in Texas is true, considering the number of Lone Star State suburbs that are quickly growing in population and overall wealth," the report's author wrote.

The top 10 fastest growing wealthy suburbs in America are:

  • No. 1 – Fulshear, Texas
  • No. 2 – Celina, Texas
  • No. 3 – Prosper, Texas
  • No. 4 – Erie, Colorado
  • No. 5 – Clarksburg, Maryland
  • No. 6 – Zionsville, Indiana
  • No. 7 – Redmond, Washington
  • No. 8 – Dublin, California
  • No. 9 – Parkland, Florida
  • No. 10 – Eastvale, California
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This story originally appeared on our sister site CultureMap.com.

Rice research breakthrough paves the way for advanced disease therapies

study up

Bioengineers at Rice University have developed a “new construction kit” for building custom sense-and-respond circuits in human cells, representing a major breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology, which could "revolutionize" autoimmune disease and cancer therapeutics.

In a study published in the journal Science, the team focused on phosphorylation, a cellular process in the body in which a phosphate group is added to a protein, signaling a response. In multicellular organisms, phosphorylation-based signaling can involve a multistage, or a cascading-like effect. Rice’s team set out to show that each cycle in a cascade can be treated as an elementary unit, meaning that they can be reassembled in new configurations to form entirely novel pathways linking cellular inputs and outputs.

Previous research on using phosphorylation-based signaling for therapeutic purposes has focused on re-engineering pathways.

“This opens up the signaling circuit design space dramatically,” Caleb Bashor, assistant professor of bioengineering and biosciences and corresponding author on the study, said in a news release. “It turns out, phosphorylation cycles are not just interconnected but interconnectable … Our design strategy enabled us to engineer synthetic phosphorylation circuits that are not only highly tunable but that can also function in parallel with cells’ own processes without impacting their viability or growth rate.”

Bashor is the deputy director for the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute, which launched last year.

The Rice lab's sense-and-respond cellular circuit design is also innovative because phosphorylation occurs rapidly. Thus, the new circuits could potentially be programmed to respond to physiological events in minutes, compared to other methods, which take hours to activate.

Rice’s team successfully tested the circuits for sensitivity and their ability to respond to external signals, such as inflammatory issues. The researchers then used the framework to engineer a cellular circuit that can detect certain factors, control autoimmune flare-ups and reduce immunotherapy-associated toxicity.

“This work brings us a whole lot closer to being able to build ‘smart cells’ that can detect signs of disease and immediately release customizable treatments in response,” Xiaoyu Yang, a graduate student in the Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology Ph.D. program at Rice who is the lead author on the study, said in a news release.

Ajo-Franklin, a professor of biosciences, bioengineering, chemical and biomolecular engineering and a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Scholar, added “the Bashor lab’s work vaults us forward to a new frontier — controlling mammalian cells’ immediate response to change.”

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