Recent Release of Hospital Safety Grades

To Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Health System Corporation and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine managers

Dear Colleagues,

The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit organization, recently released its hospital safety grades. The group assigns letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the U.S. Of all the hospitals in Maryland, Howard County General Hospital was the only one to receive an A grade. The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Sibley Memorial Hospital and Suburban Hospital each received a B, and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center received a C.

Johns Hopkins Medicine supports and advocates for transparency of quality and safety to all consumers. The Leapfrog safety grades are one of many quality measures to inform and aid consumers when they make important decisions about their health care. The grade includes a combination of nationally reported quality measures in areas such as infections, hospital acquired conditions, patient experience, intensive care unit physician staffing, patient safety indicators and more. Hospitals are responsible for monitoring and reporting on hundreds of measures that are, in turn, publically reported and used by external agencies such as the Leapfrog Group to develop safety scores on quality of care.

The challenge is that there are no national standards for how external agencies create this methodology. A hospital can receive a high score in one group's grading system, while it receives a low score from another group. In addition, the time period of some of the measures can date back several years — which doesn't reflect current performance — and there are no alternative measures for external agencies to use that demonstrate high quality and safety performance.

Leapfrog Group is making a great effort to reduce preventable harms by informing consumers where to receive care. As an industry, health care must be better in terms of patient safety and, each day, Johns Hopkins Medicine strives to make improvements for the people we serve.

Congratulations to our Howard County General colleagues on this recognition. Thanks also to all of our faculty and staff members across JHHS for your diligence in providing the best in quality and patient safety in all the work that you do.

Sincerely,

Renee Demski, M.S.W.
Vice President of Quality
Johns Hopkins Health System
Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality