When it comes to hospital quality and safety, you generally can’t score higher than an “A” grade on your public report card, so you can bet there’s been some celebrating over the weekend at Lakeland Health thanks to the performance score of Lakeland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph. They and five Spectrum Health units scored the highest of any West Michigan hospitals in the ranks…and were the only straight “A’s” in the group.
The Leapfrog Group has announced the spring 2018 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades, finding signs hospitals are making progress in reducing avoidable deaths from errors and infections. The bi-annual grading assigns “A,” “B,” “C,” “D” and “F” letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the U.S., and is the nation’s only rating focused entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections that collectively are the third leading cause of death in the United States.
Leah Binder is President & CEO of Leapfrog. She says, “The national numbers on death and harm in hospitals have alarmed us for decades. What we see in the new round of Safety Grades are signs of many hospitals making significant improvements in their patient safety record.” Binder adds, “Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades have definitely spurred these improvement efforts. But the hospitals achieving new milestones are doing the hard work, and we salute them as well as the leaders, researchers and organizations fighting every year for patient safety.”
Signs of hospitals achieving improvements included:
- Five “A” hospitals receiving this grade for the very first time this spring had an “F” grade in the past
- 46 hospitals have achieved an “A” for the first time since the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade began six years ago
- 89 hospitals receiving an “A” at one point had received a “D” or “F”
- Continued strong performance from states including Rhode Island, Hawaii, Wisconsin, and Idaho which once ranked near the bottom of the state rankings of percentage of “A” hospitals but now rank in the top ten
Improvement has also been seen in Maryland and Washington, D.C. metro area. Maryland, which received Safety Grades for the first time in fall 2017, moved out of the bottom five in Leapfrog’s bi-annual state rankings analysis, with three “A” hospitals: Howard County General Hospital, Northwest Hospital and The Johns Hopkins Hospital. This analysis ranks states according to their percentage of “A” hospitals. Washington. D.C. also saw its first “A” grade hospital, Sibley Memorial Hospital, since spring 2013. The nation’s capital has consistently ranked near the bottom of Leapfrog’s rankings analysis.
Of the 76 Michigan hospital facilities that were involved in the new report, 23 garnered the “A” rating with the balance beyond Lakeland and Spectrum taking place elsewhere in the state beyond West Michigan. Another 24 pulled a “B” grade, 24 scored at the “C” level, 4 were given “D’s,” and one hospital failed completely with an “F.”
The tally puts Michigan overall in the middle of the pack…24th in the nation for the percentage of “A” grade hospitals. That’s a sizable leap forward from the state’s 36th rank in the last report filed.
Elsewhere in the region, Lakeland Niles was graded at “C,” both Borgess and Bronson in Kalamazoo were given “B’s,” and Sturgis was also ranked at “B.”
Additional Hospital Safety Grade findings include:
- Of the approximately 2,500 hospitals graded, 30-percent earned an “A,” 28-percent earned a “B,” 35-percent a “C,” six percent a “D” and one percent an “F”
- The five states with the highest percentage of “A” hospitals this spring are Hawaii, Idaho, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Virginia
- Hospitals with “F” grades are located in California, Washington, D.C., Florida, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey and New York
- There are no “A” hospitals in Alaska, Delaware or North Dakota
- Impressively, 49 hospitals nationwide have achieved an “A” in every grading update since the launch of the Safety Grade in spring 2012
The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is calculated by top patient safety experts, peer-reviewed, fully transparent and free to the public. It is updated every six months, once in the fall and once in the spring.
Also announced this week, Leapfrog published planned updates to the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade methodology for the Fall 2018 grading cycle. Hospitals and other stakeholders are encouraged to view the planned updates and submit public comments on those changes.
For more information about the Safety Grade, as well as individual hospital grades and state rankings, you can visit online at www.hospitalsafetygrade.org and follow the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade on Twitter and Facebook.
