The Leapfrog Group released the fall 2021 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, which assigns a letter grade to U.S. general hospitals based on how well they prevent medical errors, accidents, injuries, and infections that kill or harm patients. The fall 2021 Hospital Safety Grade represents the largest set of hospitals ever graded with grades assigned to 2,901 facilities. The Safety Grades reflect performance on more than 30 evidence-based measures of patient safety, including for the first time, post-operative sepsis, blood leakage, and kidney injury.
Among the new measures incorporated into the grade is post-operative sepsis. Overall, sepsis in all settings, including post-operative sepsis, kills over 270,000 people a year and is the costliest condition in U.S. hospitals. The condition does not affect all populations equally; for instance, Black people are twice as likely as white people to be diagnosed with sepsis. At HospitalSafetyGrade.org, the public can find detailed information about a hospital’s performance on post-operative sepsis and other measures used to grade hospitals.
The fall grades show significant variation in patient safety performance across U.S. hospitals, which underscores the importance of access to information that allows patients to select the safest hospital available to them.
Across all states, highlights of findings from the fall 2021 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade include:
- Thirty-two percent of hospitals received an “A,” 26% received a “B,” 35% received a “C,” 7% received a “D,” and less than 1% received an “F.”
- The five states with the highest percentages of “A” hospitals are Virginia, North Carolina, Idaho, Massachusetts, and Colorado.
- There were no “A” hospitals in Delaware, Washington, DC, and North Dakota.
Read more:
- Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade: https://www.HospitalSafetyGrade.org