For the sixth time in a row, the U-M Health System’s patient care has earned a top grade on a national report card for patient safety — showing how well U-M clinicians protect patients from errors, injuries and infections.
The Fall 2014 Hospital Safety Score, issued Wednesday by the Leapfrog Group patient safety organization, gives patients a quick way to understand how well health care institutions are doing on a broad range of safety measures.
more information
Just like a school report card, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Score assigns a letter grade of A through F based on 28 measures of patient safety. Out of the more than 2,500 hospitals that participated in this round, 31 percent received an “A”. Out of the 79 hospitals in Michigan, 23 received an “A”.
More than a third of American hospitals voluntarily report data through the Leapfrog Group’s annual survey, to be shared online with the public. The data also help quality-oriented hospitals assess their performance compared with others, and improve.
A deep dive into the data behind the grade shows that UMHS outperforms the majority of Leapfrog hospitals on most measures. On three of them, related to infections and ventilator care, UMHS improved even since the last assessment, published in April.
UMHS also continued to earn some of the highest scores in the country for physician staffing in intensive care units, and use of computerized physician order entry to prevent errors.
UMHS also scores high on many measures that aren’t factored into the Hospital Safety Score, but are reported on the Leapfrog Group’s website.
The new data also show opportunities for UMHS to improve compared with other Leapfrog hospitals. Multidisciplinary teams are hard at work on these issues, says UMHS Chief Medical Officer Dr. Darrell A. Campbell Jr.
“Our patients and their loved ones can have confidence that this ‘A’ represents a collective effort by all our clinicians to keep them safe,” he says. “But we will never rest on our laurels, nor stop looking for ways to improve.”
Campbell, a national leader on patient safety who has led multiple major health care quality initiatives, is a member of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.
