Denver’s Top Doctors 2021

Each listing includes the physician’s name, the hospitals at which the physician has privileges, the doctor’s office, clinic, or hospital address, and the best phone number to call for an appointment. Full listings, including information about how many years each physician has been on the Top Doctors list, are available at directory.5280.com/award/2021-top-doctors/.

Because of space restrictions, we abbreviate the names of some area hospitals in the listings. Below are our abbreviations and the official names as well as their health care systems. If applicable, we provide the names of some surgical centers in the listings; however, they are not included below.

Aurora – The Medical Center of Aurora—HealthOne
Avista – Avista Adventist Hospital—Centura Health
Castle Rock – Castle Rock Adventist Hospital—Centura Health
Children’s – Children’s Hospital Colorado
Denver Health – Denver Health Medical Center
Good Samaritan – Good Samaritan Medical Center—SCL Health
Highlands Ranch – UCHealth Highlands Ranch Hospital—UCHealth
Littleton – Littleton Adventist Hospital—Centura Health
Lutheran – Lutheran Medical Center—SCL Health
National Jewish – National Jewish Health
OrthoColorado – OrthoColorado Hospital—Centura Health
Parker – Parker Adventist Hospital—Centura Health
Porter – Porter Adventist Hospital—Centura Health
Presbyterian/St. Luke’s – Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center—HealthOne
RMHC – Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center—HealthOne
Rose – Rose Medical Center—HealthOne
Sky Ridge – Sky Ridge Medical Center—HealthOne
St. Anthony – St. Anthony Hospital—Centura Health
St. Joseph – Saint Joseph Hospital—SCL Health
Swedish – Swedish Medical Center—HealthOne
University – UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital—UCHealth
Veterans – Veterans Affairs Eastern Colorado Health Care System—Veterans Health Administration

Who Decides?

Frequently asked questions about the Top Doctors selection process.

Why didn’t you choose my doctor?
We don’t pick the docs—Denver physicians do. For the past 27 years, 5280 has surveyed doctors and asked them, specialty by specialty, which metro-area physicians they would trust to treat themselves and their families. Our theory is that medical professionals are best qualified to judge other medical professionals. The ballot is posted on 5280.com from the end of January to mid-March each year. Every metro-area doctor with a valid Colorado medical license can fill it out. Once the doctor hits “save,” the votes are entered into our database and tallied.

So doesn’t that make it one big popularity contest?
In some respects, yes. We hope that doctors give us careful, responsible answers, but there’s little we can do to stop them from recommending their skiing buddies. Using the list is a lot like going to your doctor and asking for a referral. The difference is that we’re asking a lot more doctors than you’d ever have the chance to. Also, by working to raise our return rate (it was 13 percent this year), we hope to correct for politics. The more doctors who participate, the less chance that any one person’s aspirations will win out.

I thought my doc was a good physician, but she’s not on the list. What does that mean?
Nothing. She probably is a good doctor. The selection of doctors by peer review can leave many excellent doctors off the list. Because longtime, well-known doctors have the advantage of name recognition, the list may favor that kind of doctor. However, that in no way means your doctor isn’t qualified and completely competent.

I’m a doctor, and I couldn’t access the online ballot. Why?
We get the database of all licensed physicians in the state from the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies and select the doctors located in the seven metro-area counties (Denver, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Boulder, Adams, Douglas, and Jefferson), which results in a list of more than 12,000 docs.

If you attempted to log on to the system and received a pop-up response that said, “Login failed, please check your name and license number,” that means there is a disconnect between your information and the information we have in the system.

If you’ve recently moved to Colorado and haven’t updated your publicly available address with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies, for example, your license will not register as local and therefore will be invalid in our system. If you have registered your license at an address outside the seven metro-area counties, you will not be in our database. If you have a hard-to-spell last name or if you’ve recently changed your name, it’s possible the information we have from the state is incorrect and you will have trouble logging in.

In the future, if you have difficulty accessing our system, please use the “comment” tool on the ballot site and let us know. We’re happy to work through the problem so you can vote.

I’ve heard the list is rigged—that only doctors who advertise with 5280 make it. Is that true?
Nope. The Top Doctors list is unaffected by which doctors advertise in the magazine and/or on our website. Doctors sometimes choose to advertise after they’ve been chosen for the list, but how much or if and when doctors choose to advertise are not taken into consideration. Period.

How does 5280 choose the medical specialties on the list?
Through the years we’ve worked to improve Top Doctors by updating the categories, increasing the number of eligible voters, and considering suggestions from health care professionals. For more than two decades, our categories have included only specialties approved by the American Board of Medical Specialties (although we do not include every ABMS specialty). This system for choosing categories eases confusion among doctors filling out the survey and reduces the amount of lobbying we get from doctors and hospitals that would like us to include more obscure specialties.

So why aren’t categories such as chiropractic and podiatry ever included in the list?
Although these areas of medicine are completely relevant, respectable, and necessary, our list is a physician-only (M.D.s and D.O.s) directory.

Does 5280 check out all the doctors on the list?
The magazine’s research department independently verifies every doctor’s name, phone number, office address, and hospital affiliations. We also take the additional step of sending our list to the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies for approval—meaning doctors on our list do not currently have disciplinary actions against their licenses and have not experienced a malpractice suit and/or settlement in at least five years.

The magazine sometimes chooses doctors to be profiled or to serve as sources for the accompanying story. How are they chosen?
5280 sometimes likes to introduce you to some of our Top Docs through profiles or by using them to explain different aspects of medicine. We believe this is a great way to show our readers that these physicians are not just names on a list. In choosing doctors to include, we do our best to vary the medical specialties represented and introduce you to doctors we have never included before. Of course, sometimes our stories involve doctors who are not on the list as well.