Rush-Copley in Aurora has straight A’s in patient safety and Delnor Hospital in Geneva earned its fifth straight A, but two Kane County hospitals dropped a letter grade in Leapfrog Group’s fall 2017 assessments.

Developed under the guidance of an expert panel, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses 27 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.

Rush-Copley Medical Center in Aurora was designated as a “straight A” hospital for earning an A grade in each grading period since Leapfrog started conducting the measurements in 2014.

Joining Rush-Copley with an A grade is Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital in Geneva, which won an A grade for the four straight grading period.

Advocate Sherman Hospital in Elgin dropped to a B grade from the A it earned in the spring. In fact, Advocate Sherman has had an A grade in six of the eight grading periods.

Presence St. Joseph Hospital in Elgin stayed at a C grade, the same grade it has had in Spring 2017 and Fall 2016. Prior to that point, Presence had earned four B’s and an A.

Leapfrog points out that patients in general have a 1-in-25 chance of leaving the hospital with a new infection. The Hospital Safety Grade is designed to help consumers identify hospitals that are doing better on patient safety.

Dr. Larry Goodman, CEO of the Rush system, which includes the three hospitals, said in a Tuesday (Oct. 31, 2017) news release that the Leapfrog grade shows that commitment to patient safety is deeply embedded in the culture of the Rush system.

“It’s both obvious and enormously important that hospitals shouldn’t do things that negatively impact patients’ health,” he said. “At Rush, we focus intently on safety, and we’ve developed programs to strengthen our safeguards against medical errors and hospital-acquired infections.”

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, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 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

Founded in 2000 by large employers and other purchasers, The Leapfrog Group is a national nonprofit organization driving a movement for giant leaps forward in the quality and safety of American health care. The flagship Leapfrog Hospital Survey collects and transparently reports hospital performance, empowering purchasers to find the highest-value care and giving consumers the lifesaving information they need to make informed decisions.

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, Leapfrog’s other main initiative, assigns letter grades to hospitals based on their record of patient safety, helping consumers protect themselves and their families from errors, injuries, accidents, and infections.