Kane County hospitals earned high grades for safety in Leapfrog’s spring 2017 report.

In fact, three of five hospitals earned an “A” rating, one a “B” and one a “C”.

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades — which assign A, B, C, D and F letter grades to hospitals nationwide and provide the most complete picture of patient safety in the U.S. — were announced Wednesday (April 12, 2017) by The Leapfrog Group, a national patient safety watchdog.

Leapfrog awarded A grades to 823 hospitals out of the 2,639 in the United States that it evaluated for their commitment to reducing errors, infections, and accidents that can harm patients.

Although the information is new, the letter grade for each hospital was unchanged from the fall 2016 Leapfrog report.

A news release from Rush-Copley Medical Center noted that Rush-Copley has received A grades in each of the 11 times the Leapfrog Group has rated hospitals since launching the organization’s Hospital Safety Score in June 2012, putting it among the elite 63 (2.4 percent) of the hospitals receiving grades that have earned the top score every time.

“We are pleased to be recognized once again by Leapfrog for our strong culture of safety,” said Barry C. Finn, president and CEO of Rush-Copley and executive vice president of the Rush system.  “Our physicians and staff work every day to improve the quality of service and care they provide — care that’s delivered with the highest standards of safety and compassion.”

Developed under the guidance of an expert panel, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses 30 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign A, B, C, D and F grades to more than 2,600 U.S. hospitals twice per year. It is calculated by top patient safety experts, peer-reviewed, fully transparent and free to the public.

A-Level Care Saves Lives

An analysis conducted for Leapfrog found that an estimated 206,021 avoidable deaths occur in hospitals in the United States each year, and that an estimated 33,439 lives could be saved annually if all hospitals performed as well as A-rated hospitals. The study also found that the risk of avoidable death was nine percent higher in B hospitals than A hospitals, and rose to 35 percent higher in C hospitals and 50 percent higher in D and F hospitals.

Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality provided the analysis in the spring of this year, using that period’s round of safety grade data.

About the Grade

Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades (formerly known as Hospital Safety Scores) are assigned to more than 2,600 general acute-care hospitals across the nation twice annually. The Safety Grade is becoming the gold standard measure of patient safety, cited in MSNBC, The New York Times, and AARP The Magazine.

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses national performance measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey and Health Information Technology Supplement.

Taken together, those performance measures produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors. The Safety Grade includes 30 measures, all currently in use by national measurement and reporting programs. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade methodology has been peer reviewed and published in the Journal of Patient Safety.

Leapfrog works under the guidance of the seven-member Blue Ribbon Expert Panel to select appropriate measures and develop a scoring methodology. The Expert Panel is made up of patient safety experts from across the country.

About The Leapfrog Group

The Leapfrog Group (www.leapfroggroup.org) is a national organization using the collective leverage of large purchasers of health care to initiate breakthrough improvements in the safety, quality, and affordability of health care for Americans. The flagship Leapfrog Hospital Survey allows purchasers to structure their contracts and purchasing to reward the highest performing hospitals. The Leapfrog Group was founded in November 2000 with support from the Business Roundtable and national funders, and is now independently operated with support from its purchaser and other members.