Do Chicagoland Hospitals Make the Grade When It Comes to Patient Safety?
Midwest Business Group on Health reacts to national update of the Hospital Safety Score
Media Contact: Cary Conway
CHICAGO – Chicagoland has the highest number of hospitals rated with an A for patient safety excellence of any other metropolitan area in the nation. This is among the findings of the latest release of the Hospital Safety Score program by the Leapfrog Group, an independent, national not-for-profit organization focused on quality and patient safety. Almost every hospital in the nation received a score of A, B, C, D or F, based on a set of measures used by national measurement and reporting programs. According to the Midwest Business Group on Health (MBGH), the Leapfrog Group’s Illinois Regional Rollout leader, scores were assigned to 118 hospitals in Illinois with about 43 percent receiving the highest score of A.s.
“The Hospital Safety Score program highlights the country’s safest hospitals and provides important information for consumers about a community’s hospitals and which institutions are placing a priority on avoiding preventable deaths and injuries,” said Larry Boress, MBGH president and CEO. “Illinois consumers should use the Hospital Safety Score as an important resource when choosing a hospital for their families in non-emergency situations and as a topic to discuss with their doctors.”
Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group commented, “We were pleased that many hospitals used the Hospital Safety Score to identify areas for improvement. The employers and other purchasers of care that are part of Leapfrog are looking for rapid reduction in the errors, accidents, and injures that are harming people unnecessarily, and we are pleased to see that change is happening. More needs to be done, and faster, but we congratulate the hospitals that are leading the way.”
MBGH intends to use the Hospital Safety Score program as a tool to:
- Educate consumers about patient safety and the importance of being a partner with their physician in making health care treatment decisions.
- Communicate and work with hospitals and health plans to encourage all hospitals to set goals for achieving an A score.
- Work with employers and other health care purchasers to promote quality and cost transparency of health care providers for contracting, network development and to spur safety improvements in our health care system.
Calculated under the guidance of a nine-member Blue Ribbon Panel of patient safety experts, the Hospital Safety Score uses 26 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce a single score that represents a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.
The November 2012 release of the Hospital Safety Score is a planned update from the initial June 2012 report. Though several hospitals showed improvement during the six-month window, hospitals with a Score Pending assignment in the initial report that still demonstrated poor national surgical outcomes scores, non-use of evidenced-based patient safety processes, or had not shown an organizational commitment to patient safety by the November release, received a D or F score.
For more information on the Hospital Safety Score, or to find out the score of your local hospital, visit www.hospitalsafetyscore.org.
About the Midwest Business Group on Health
Celebrating more than 32 years of advancing value in health care and health benefits management, the non-profit Midwest Business Group on Health (MBGH) is one of the nation's leading business groups of private and public employers. MBGH's more than 120 members represent over 3 million lives, spending more than $3 billion on health care benefits annually. MBGH member benefits include educational workshops for health benefits management, networking opportunities, research, demonstration projects and community initiatives. MBGH is a founding member of the National Business Coalition on Health. www.mbgh.org
About The Leapfrog Group
The Hospital Safety Score is an initiative of The Leapfrog Group a national nonprofit organization using the collective leverage of large purchasers of health care to initiate breakthrough improvements in the safety, quality, and affordability of health care for Americans. The flagship Leapfrog Hospital Survey allows purchasers to structure their contracts and purchasing to reward the highest performing hospitals. The Leapfrog Group was founded in November 2000 with support from the Business Roundtable and national funders, and is now independently operated with support from its purchaser and other members. www.leapfroggroup.org