To your health! What better way to welcome a brand-new year than with a guide custom-tailored to keep you feeling great? For the past 11 years, our Top Doctors & Nurses feature has provided a peer-vetted list of practitioners in specialties from acupuncture to vascular surgery, culled through a robust online process that we continually revise to be ever more inclusive, relevant, and methodologically sound.

How do we create this list? It’s an intensive five-month process that starts with a simple question: to whom would Portland’s medical providers trust the care of their loved ones? Survey respondents nominate peers in up to 76 specialties. And when the votes come in—this year, we tallied more than 11,000—our anonymous advisory panel of doctors and nurse practitioners vets and authenticates each of the nominees, one by one. We then reach out to the top 5 percent of vote-getters (those would be the names on the following pages) to determine how best you, the prospective patient, can secure their services.

As you browse the region’s 530-plus top doctors, nurse practitioners, and complementary medicine practitioners of 2016, we hope you’ll agree that this project adds up to much more than a list of names. Portland’s health care community keeps getting better, and so, we hope, does this guide we humbly provide.

METHODOLOGY: Using a secure online survey system, Portland Monthly solicited peer nominations from every licensed doctor and registered nurse in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas Counties. Participants logged in with their medical license number and were asked to nominate up to three names in each medical specialty; we specifically asked that they consider peers to whom they would entrust their own families’ care. After the votes were tallied, Portland Monthly compiled a list of the top vote recipients in each specialty and confirmed that they were all certified to practice in their fields by their respective medical licensing board. Next, we gathered an independent, voluntary, and anonymous panel of doctors and nurse practitioners representing a range of local hospitals and private clinics to assess each finalist by their accomplishments, education, patient satisfaction surveys, and other evidence-based criteria.