25 Massachusetts Hospitals Get 'A' Grades For Safety

The nonprofit Leapfrog group released its twice-yearly round of hospital safety grades. See how your hospital scored.

Jean Dubail, Patch Staff

Posted Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 11:47 am ET|Updated Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 12:32 pm ET

Twenty-five Massachusetts hospitals received an A grade in hospital safety, according to new fall 2019 ratings released this week by the Leapfrog Group. The nonprofit group's rating system, released twice a year, focuses on errors, accidents, injuries and infections at 2,600 general acute-care hospitals around the country.

Leapfrog assigns each hospital an A,B,C,D or F letter grade. This fall, 33 percent earned an A grade, a 1 percent increase from the last round of safety grades, released in the spring.

Maine, Utah, Virginia, Oregon and North Carolina had the highest percentage of hospitals that received an A grade. Three states — Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota — did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

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The release of the Fall 2019 safety grades coincides with the 20th anniversary of a published report that revealed nearly 100,000 lives are lost every year because of preventable medical errors.

“In stark contrast to 20 years ago, we’re now able to pinpoint where the problems are, and that allows us to grade hospitals,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a press release. “It also allows us to better track progress. Encouragingly, we are seeing fewer deaths from the preventable errors we monitor in our grading process.”

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Leapfrog explains that the safety grade includes performance measures taken from federal government data and the group’s own hospital survey to “produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.” The group relies on a panel of experts to select the measures used in the methodology and to develop a scoring system. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)

Grades for Massachusetts hospitals are shown below:

Grade A:

Baystate Franklin Medical Center, Greenfield

Baystate Noble Hospital, Westfield

Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Plymouth, Plymouth

Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Milton, Milton

Beverly Hospital, Beverly

Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital, Boston

Brigham And Women's Hospital, Boston

Cape Cod Hospital, Hyannis

Carney Hospital, Dorchester

Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Northampton