Hospitals improve never events, HAIs in Leapfrog’s Safety Grades

Photo: Emir Memedovski/Getty Images

The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit watchdog organization that advocates for patient safety in hospitals, has released the fall 2022 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade results, showing an overall reduction in never events and progress on stemming healthcare-associated infections.

Measures used in the Hospital Safety Grade have changed over time, but measures that could be reliably tracked over the past decade show a consistent pattern of better performance. For five of the outcome measures that can be tracked, these improvements saved an estimated more than 16,000 lives over the 10-year period, Leapfrog’s numbers showed.

Measures that have shown significant improvement over the decade include some never events, meaning medical events that should never happen. Two never events – incidents of falls and trauma, and incidents of objects unintentionally left in a body after surgery – both decreased by around 25%.

There was also encouraging pre-pandemic progress on healthcare-associated infections: Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) decreased by 22%; Central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) decreased by 43%; and Clostridioides difficile infection (C. Diff) decreased by 8%.

This release marks the 10th anniversary of the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, which assigns a letter grade to nearly 3,000 U.S. general hospitals based on how well they protect patients from preventable medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections.

WHAT’S THE IMPACT

Over the past decade, hospitals also demonstrated dramatic improvement in adoption of technology and staffing strategies that protect patients from preventable harm and death. 

That includes a nearly seven-fold increase in the adoption of computerized provider order entry, which can reduce medication errors by more than 40%. Hospitals also improved on strategies to improve engagement of the nursing workforce and overall safety culture.

These improvements in patient safety align with other research, including a 2022 study in JAMA that found the rates of preventable adverse events in hospitalized patients significantly declined for patients across a range of key patient safety measures – most of which are used in the Hospital Safety Grade – between 2010 and 2019.

Among the other highlights, 30% of hospitals received an “A,” 28% received a “B,” 36% received a “C,” 6% received a “D,” and 1% received an “F.”

The top 10 states with the highest percentages of “A” hospitals are New Hampshire, Virginia, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maine, Pennsylvania and Florida. There were no “A” hospitals in Washington, D.C., North Dakota or Vermont.

THE LARGER TREND

The findings from Leapfrog’s fall report contrasts with the spring report, which found an overall decline in patient safety measures the report considers “significant,” though the spring report did not take a broad look at the past decade, as the new edition has done.

The Leapfrog Group is a national nonprofit organization founded in 2000 by large employers and other purchasers. The flagship Leapfrog Hospital Survey and new Leapfrog Ambulatory Surgery Center Survey collect and report hospital and ASC performance.

The Hospital Safety Grade, Leapfrog’s other main initiative, assigns letter grades to hospitals based on their record of patient safety, with the goal of helping consumers protect themselves and their families from errors, injuries, accidents and infections.

ON THE RECORD

“Never in history have we seen across-the-board improvement in patient safety until this last decade, coinciding with the history of the Hospital Safety Grade,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group. “We salute hospitals for this milestone and encourage them to accelerate their hard work saving patient lives. For a long time, the healthcare community tried to improve safety, but progress stalled. The big difference over this decade is that for the first time, we publicly reported each hospital’s record on patient safety, and that galvanized the kind of change we all hoped for. It’s not enough change, but we are on the right track.”
 

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