Rome hospitals get ‘B’ grade
The national Leapfrog Group report looks at patient safety.
Both Floyd Medical Center and Redmond Regional Medical Center received “B’s” in the latest hospital patient safety rankings released by the Leapfrog Group.
About one- fourth of Georgia hospitals received an “A” grade. That percentage is down from this past fall, when onethird of Georgia hospitals got top marks in the organization’s ratings.
Leapfrog gives “A” through “F” grades to more than 2,500 hospitals based on how they prevent medical errors, injuries, accidents and infections.
The ratings from Leapfrog, a patient safety organization founded by employers, are issued every fall and spring.
Redmond had scored “A’s” for four consecutive years, and FMC had top marks for the three prior years.
Leapfrog said 153 hospitals across the nation have earned straight “A’s” since 2013, two of them in Georgia — Gordon Hospital in Calhoun and West Georgia Medical Center in LaGrange, which recently joined WellStar Health System.
In the new survey, Georgia came in 35th among states in the overall percentage of top- performing hospitals. The state’s hospitals were ranked 10th in the fall Leapfrog analysis.
The Leapfrog ratings come just days after the Obama administration, bowing to pressure from the hospital industry, decided to delay the government’s own rating system of hospital quality. The new star rating from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will use 62 measures to devise a unified rating of one to five stars, with five being the best.
This month, 60 senators and 225 members of the House of Representatives signed letters urging CMS to delay releasing the star ratings, Kaiser Health News reported last week.
“We have heard from hospitals in our districts that they do not have the necessary data to replicate or evaluate CMS’s work to ensure that the
methodology is accurate or fair,” the letter from the House members said.
The unreleased CMS ratings and the Leapfrog Group’s rankings are part of a growing push to analyze and report on quality of medical care.
Not all hospitals are graded by Leapfrog. Critical access hospitals and pediatric facilities are excluded because of insufficient data.
Scoring an “A” grade this time were 17 hospitals across Georgia, including some in metro Atlanta, Macon, Augusta and Athens, as well as smaller cities. Several Georgia hospitals scored a “D,” but none in the state received an “F.”
“There are several ratings that we get and we look at all of them,” said
Dr. Joseph Biuso, executive vice president and chief medical officer at FMC.
Biuso said FMC has been paying extra attention to infection control, which has been an issue in the national news in recent years.
Floyd got an average score in communications with patients regarding their medications. “We actually have a team working on this as well,” Biuso said. “It’s a tough area but we are working on that because it’s very serious, and you want patients to know exactly what they’re supposed to do when they’re discharged from the hospital.”
Andrea Pitts, director or marketing and public relations at RRMC, said since the data was collected from 20122015, Redmond has made improvements.
“Some of our implemented programs include enhanced multidisciplinary care-team coordination, improved coding of medical records and the addition of a patient experience officer,” Pitts said.
The Leapfrog analysis found that despite considerable improvement in the safety of hospital care since the ratings launch in 2012, avoidable deaths remain high. In total, the analysis showed an estimated 206,021 avoidable deaths occur in U.S. hospitals each year, a figure Leapfrog said was likely an underestimate.
Leapfrog said that compared to “A” hospitals (the safest), there is a 9 percent higher risk of avoidable death in “B” hospitals, a 35 percent higher risk in “C” hospitals and a 50 percent higher risk in “D” and “F” hospitals.
“It is time for every hospital in America to put patient safety at the top of their priority list, because tens of thousands of lives are at stake,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, said in a statement.
Besides its own hospital survey, Leapfrog compiles the safety scores using information from organizations including the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the CDC and CMS. The ratings include 30 measures that are publicly reported by hospitals.
The Georgia Hospital Association’s president, Earl Rogers, said in a statement last week that his organization supports efforts of the state’s hospitals to improve patient safety and quality of care.
“While we agree that patients and families should be equipped with as much information as possible when choosing a health care provider, it should be noted that because organizations like Leapfrog utilize different quality measures, performance data and methodologies to calculate scores, a hospital can perform well in one ranking and poorly in another,” Rogers said.
“The Leapfrog data is just one of many tools patients can use when making health care decisions such as choos-
ing a hospital. When selecting a health care provider, we encourage patients and families to use all available tools at their disposal, such as talking with friends and family and consulting with doctors, nurses and other practitioners,” Rogers added.
Beth Stephens of Georgia Watch, a consumer advocacy group, said her organization seeks to raise awareness among consumers that safety information is available.
‘It is time for every hospital in America to put patient safety at the top of their priority list, because tens of thousands of lives are at stake.’ Leah Binder CEO of Leapfrog Group