Are CEOs and Administrators responsible for Quality and Safety in their Hospitals?
- Do you know that since the introduction of the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program began eight years ago, more than 2,000 hospitals have been penalized at least once?
- Do you know that Medicare cuts payments each year by 1 percent for hospitals that fall into the worst-performing quartile?
- Do you know that in the 2022 fiscal year 764 hospitals having the highest rates of patient injuries and infections will have their payments trimmed?
- Do you know that the program is designed to prevent harm to patients by providing a financial incentive for hospitals to prevent hospital-acquired conditions?
- Do you know that your hospital’s total score is based on performance on several quality measures that include rates of infections, blood clots and other complications that occurred and might have been prevented?
- Is your hospital one of the fifty-five hospitals that have been penalized all eight years that the program has been in place?
According to CMS, much of how the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program is structured, including penalty amounts, is determined by law, and cannot be substantially altered. As reported in Becker’s Hospital Review, the hospital industry argues that program’s design punishes hospitals that test most thoroughly for infections, since these facilities will appear to have the highest rates of infection, while those with less-thorough testing might appear to have lower rates.
This may be true, but the ratings are not only on infections but on all complications that are deemed preventable. Evidence of this can be easily found in the Leapfrog Group’s Hospital Safety Grade program so you can see how well your hospital protects its patients from errors, accidents, injuries, and infections. Using the simple letter grade system, you can find out:
- How well does my hospital prevent infections and encourage handwashing?
- Does my hospital value patient safety by supporting strong health care teams?
- Are there policies in place for preventing errors?
Nearly 3,000 hospitals are issued a Safety Grade twice per year.
For more than 20 years, The Leapfrog Group has collected, analyzed, and published hospital data on safety and quality to push the health care industry forward. Leapfrog’s bold transparency has promoted high-value care and informed health care decisions, and helped trigger giant leaps forward in the safety, quality, and affordability of U.S. health care.
Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades are assigned to nearly 3,000 general acute-care hospitals across the nation twice annually. The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses more than 30 national performance measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and information from other supplemental data sources. 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.
