The Washington, D.C.-based Leapfrog Group, an organization focused on quality and safety in U.S. healthcare, has published the results of a new study in which that organization examined the question of how many patients might be dying in U.S. hospitals because of errors, accidents, and injuries, finding that the risk of death to a patient being cared for in a poor-quality hospital is nearly double that in a hospital whose care has been judged to be high in quality.
In a press release published to its website on May 15, the organization stated that “Today, The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit representing the nation’s largest and most influential employers and purchasers of health care, released the new spring 2019 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades. In conjunction, The Leapfrog Group contracted with the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality to update its estimate of deaths due to errors, accidents, injuries and infections at “A”, “B”, “C”, “D” and “F” hospitals.”
The group stated that “Researchers assessed more than 2,600 hospitals receiving Hospital Safety Grades and found that when compared to “A” hospitals:
> Patients at “D” and “F” hospitals face a 92 percent greater risk of avoidable death
> Patients at “C” hospitals on average face an 88 percent greater risk of avoidable death
> Patients at “B” hospitals on average face a 35 percent greater risk of avoidable death
Even ‘A” hospitals are not perfectly safe,” Leapfrog researchers found, “but researchers found they are getting safer. If all hospitals had an avoidable death rate equivalent to “A” hospitals, 50,000 lives would have been saved, versus 33,000 lives that would have been saved by “A” level performance in 2016. Overall, an estimated 160,000 lives are lost annually from the avoidable medical errors that are accounted for in the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, a significant improvement from 2016, when researchers estimated 205,000 avoidable deaths.”
And, in that context, the press release quotes Leapfrog Group CEO Leah Binder as stating that “The good news is that tens of thousands of lives have been saved because of progress on patient safety. The bad news is that there’s still a lot of needless death and harm in American hospitals. Hospitals don’t all have the same track record, so it really matters which hospital people choose, which is the purpose of our Hospital Safety Grade,” Binder added.
The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades are an independent, nonprofit grading system that assigns “A,” “B,” “C,” “D” and “F” letter grades to general, acute-care hospitals in the United States. Administered on behalf of employers and other purchasers, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is the nation’s only rating system focused entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections. Methodology underlying the Safety Grade is reviewed by a National Expert Panel and receives guidance from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, which also prepared the white paper on estimated deaths associated with patient safety. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is peer-reviewed, fully transparent and free to the public. Grades are assigned twice a year in the spring and fall.
