The Leapfrog Group Spotlights ‘Straight A’ Hospitals
Patient safety measurement organization The Leapfrog Group, which recently created a program to assist hospitals that serve a disproportionately high number of low-income and uninsured patients, has released its Spring 2025 Hospital Safety Grade. The nonprofit organization also responded to a lawsuit filed by Palm Beach Health Network.
The biannual Safety Grade is an “A,” “B,” “C,” “D” or “F” assigned to all general hospitals in the United States based on their ability to protect patients from medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections.
For the first time, Leapfrog is spotlighting 346 hospitals that not only achieved an “A” for spring 2025 but have sustained the grade for five or more grading rounds, designating them “Straight A” hospitals.
Among the Straight A hospitals Leapfrog is highlighting are an elite group of 11 hospitals that earned A’s for all 27 grading rounds —13 years. The all-time Straight A hospitals are Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital (Illinois), French Hospital Medical Center (California), Inova Loudoun Hospital (Virginia), Kaiser Permanente Orange County-Anaheim Medical Center (California), Mayo Clinic-Phoenix (Arizona), Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital (Illinois), Saint Anne's Hospital (Massachusetts), Sentara CarePlex Hospital (Virginia), Sentara Leigh Hospital (Virginia), University of Chicago Medical Center (Illinois) and Virginia Mason Medical Center (Washington).
The report also ranks states abased on the number of “A” hospitals they have in spring 2025. States with the highest percentage of A Grades for spring 2025 are Utah, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, South Carolina and Virginia. Utah ranks No. 1 for the fourth consecutive Safety Grade round, and ties for No. 1 among states with the highest percentage of Straight A hospitals.
Washington, D.C. ranks No. 11 for percentage of A hospitals for spring 2025, marking a significant improvement after years of ranking lowest among states.
There are no A hospitals in Iowa, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.
Learning collaborative
The learning collaborative created to assist hospitals that serve a disproportionately high number of low-income and uninsured patients will provide structured guidance, data-driven insights and peer-to-peer learning opportunities to help participating hospitals advance their patient safety initiatives. The program will begin by addressing the prevention of pulmonary embolism (PE) and deep vein thrombosis (DVT), key components of the Patient Safety Indicator 90 (PSI-90) and the largest weighted measure set in the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade. The program will coach hospital participants on preventing these events including detecting the impact of racial and ethnic bias impacting patient outcomes.
Response to lawsuit
In a separate development reported by BocaNewsNow, several Miami-area hospitals are suing Leapfrog Group over its methodology.
BocaNewsNow published a statement from Palm Beach Health Network — the local name used by Tenet Health. The news site noted that according to the complaint, Leapfrog fails to fairly evaluate hospitals that do not complete its hospital survey, and rather than indicating that there is insufficient data to issue a grade to non-participating hospitals, it instead assigns a score equivalent to the “Worst Hospital’s Score” on several measures. “This flawed methodology does not accurately reflect hospitals’ performance or patient outcomes,” the statement said.
Leah Binder, president and CEO of the The Leapfrog Group, issued an statement in response on April 30:
“Palm Beach, Florida residents should be very concerned when local hospitals – Delray Medical Center, Good Samaritan Medical Center, Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, West Boca Medical Center and St. Mary’s Medical Center – waste money and court time to try to suppress publication of critical information their patients deserve to know. Leapfrog will win in court as we always do. But nobody wins at the bedside, where patients are needlessly at risk for suffering and even death because these hospitals have not done enough to protect them.
When we look at these hospitals’ results from Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), we see preventable suffering and death far exceeding the national average, and even the national average is too high. Instead of using their resources to file frivolous lawsuits, they should be improving how their patients are treated. That is the leadership communities expect from their hospitals.
"These hospitals may wish to withhold their hospitals’ Safety Grades from the community they serve, but Leapfrog intends to fully defend its expert, proven and long-standing methodology to prevent that from happening and publish Grades for all eligible hospitals, including these hospitals. Please review the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades for spring 2025 which are available for free on hospitalsafetygrade.org."
