Local Hospitals Receive A’s in Hospital Safety Scores

By Laura Drucker

When it comes to choosing the right hospital for your needs, the factor of patient safety—how well a hospital protects its patients from preventable medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections—should be one of the most important to take into account.

Fortunately, The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit program focused on transparency and ease of access to information in the medical field, makes it easy to see a hospital’s patient safety record. Since 2012, Leapfrog, with its Hospital Safety Scores, has been recognizing those hospitals that excel at patient safety—and those that fail.

Using 28 performance measures, Leapfrog assigns 2,530 hospitals across the country a grade, from A to F, representing how well they fare in providing safe care to their patients. A high grade denotes a hospital that is successful in such areas as harm prevention and patient safety support.

Hospital Safety Scores are released twice a year—once in the fall and once in the spring. In the recently released fall 2015 ratings, 43.6 percent of Illinois hospitals were given an A rating, including 33 Chicago-area hospitals. Seventeen hospitals in the state were awarded a Straight A designation, meaning that they have maintained a grade of A through all of the eight marking periods of the Hospital Safety Score.

To learn more about Leapfrog’s methodology and to view a hospital’s past and current ratings, along with a breakdown of its performance in key patient safety areas, visit HospitalSafetyScore.org.