Five area hospitals earn top grade in watchdog report

Five hospitals in the Greater Lehigh Valley earned a grade of A in the fall report published today by The Leapfrog Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that collects data on hospital performance.

The five are Doylestown Hospital, Grand View Health, Pocono Medical Center, Sacred Heart Hospital and St. Luke’s Hospital-Anderson Campus.

More than 2,600 general acute-care hospitals received a grade. In Pennsylvania, the organization assigned grades to 131 hospitals, with 32 receiving an A grade.

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade assigns letter grades to hospitals based on their record of patient safety. Assigning A, B, C, D and F letter grades provides the most complete picture of avoidable hospital errors, accidents and infections that kill or harm hundreds of thousands of patients every year, according to the organization.

The grade uses national performance measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey and Health Information Technology Supplement, according to The Leapfrog Group.

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.

“Basically, what people want to know is, ‘Where can I have the best chance for a successful outcome?’ ” said Tom Croyle, president of Lehigh Valley Business Coalition on Healthcare. “We have conversations with the health systems all throughout the region.”

The grades are something that health systems are “really paying attention to,” Croyle said.

“By working collaboratively with our community hospitals, we can help improve the care that every patient in Pennsylvania receives,” he said.

For a list of the hospital’s rankings in Pennsylvania, click here:

http://www.hospitalsafetygrade.org/search?findBy=state&zip_code=&city=&state_prov=PA&hospital=