Valley Hospital of Ridgewood Scores a Top Grade in Hospital Safety

Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades (formerly known as Hospital Safety Scores) are assigned to more than 2,600 general acute-care hospitals across the nation twice annually. The Safety Grade is becoming the gold standard measure of patient safety, cited in MSNBC, The New York Times, and AARP The Magazine.

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses national performance measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey and Health Information Technology Supplement.

Taken together, those performance measures produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors. The Safety Grade includes 30 measures, all currently in use by national measurement and reporting programs. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade methodology has been peer reviewed and published in the Journal of Patient Safety.

Leapfrog works under the guidance of the seven-member Blue Ribbon Expert Panel to select appropriate measures and develop a scoring methodology. The Expert Panel is made up of patient safety experts from across the country:

Arnold Milstein, M.D., M.P.H., Stanford University
Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., F.C.C.M, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Patrick Romano, M.D., M.P.H., University of California, Davis
Sara Singer, Ph.D., Harvard University
Tim Vogus, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University
Matthew D McHugh, Ph.D., J.D., M.P.H., R.N., C.R.N.P., F.A.A.N., University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
Jennifer Daley, M.D., F.A.C.P.

This Blue Ribbon Expert Panel selected 30 measures of publicly available hospital safety data, analyzed the data and determined the weight of each measure based on evidence, opportunity forimprovement and impact. Information from secondary sources supplemented any missing data to give hospitals as much credit as possible toward their Safety Grade.

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade places each measure into one of two domains: (1) Process/Structural Measures or (2) Outcome Measures, each accounting for 50 percent of the overall score.

Process Measures represent how often a hospital gives patients recommended treatment for a given medical condition or procedure. For example, “Responsiveness of hospital staff” looks at patients’ feedback on how long it takes for a staff member to respond when they request help. Structural Measures represent the environment in which patients receive care. For example, “Doctors order medications through a computer” represents whether a hospital uses a special computerized system to prevent errors when prescribing medications.
Outcome Measures represent what happens to a patient while receiving care. For example, “Dangerous object left in patient’s body” measures how many times a patient undergoing surgery had a dangerous foreign object, like a sponge or tool, left in his or her body.

A hospital must have enough safety data available for our experts to issue them a letter grade. Hospitals missing more than nine process measures or more than five outcome measures are not graded. All hospitals are encouraged to voluntarily report additional safety data through the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, but they are not required to do so to receive a Safety Grade.