The Leapfrog Group is a non-profit organization committed to driving quality, safety and transparency in the U.S. health system. Data is released twice each year.
The Hospital Safety Score assigns letter grades of A, B, C, D and F to hospitals on how safe they keep their patients from errors, injuries, accidents and infections and helps to track U.S. hospitals’ consistency in preventing harm.
For the first time, the Hospital Safety Score website offers an enhanced feature, allowing users to view a hospital’s current score alongside its previous scores over the past three years, so that consumers can evaluate whether the hospital has maintained consistently strong performance or shown a pattern of improvement.
The Hospital Safety Score uses national performance measures from the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey and Health Information Technology Supplement.
Taken together, those performance measures produce a single score representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors. The Hospital Safety Score includes 28 measures, all currently in use by national measurement and reporting programs. The methodology has been peer reviewed and published in the Journal of Patient Safety.
Out of 45 hospitals measured in South Carolina, 26.7 percent (12 total) earned a letter grade of “A.”
The Hospital Safety Score is a public service provided by The Leapfrog Group and is becoming the gold standard measure of patient safety, cited recently in MSNBC, The New York Times, and AARP The Magazine.
