Here's How 5 Bucks Co. Hospitals Are Graded For Safety

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story stated Doylestown Hospital was the only Bucks County hospital to receive an A grade. Grand View Health in Sellersville also received an A. Patch regrets the error.

The nonprofit Leapfrog Group, which assesses hospital safety, released its Fall 2018 safety ratings Thursday. The organization assessed 2,600 hospitals across the country, including 131 in Pennsylvania. Of the hospitals analyzed, 32 percent earned an A grade.

So how did Bucks County hospitals do?

The Leapfrog Group's assessment included five Bucks County hospitals. Of them, the highest rated for safety were Doylestown Hospital and Grand View Health, which both received A grades.

No Bucks County hospitals got a B or a D. Four local hospitals got a C.

Here is the full list:

• Doylestown Hospital, Doylestown (A)
• Grand View Health, Sellersville (A)
• Jefferson Bucks, Langhorne (C)
• Lower Bucks Hospital, Bristol (C)
• St. Luke's Quakertown Hospital, Quakertown (C)
• St. Mary Medical Center, Langhorne (C)

The Leapfrog Group explains that its rating system is focused entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections. Leapfrog says more than two-dozen evidence-based measures of patient safety are used to calculate the grades. Applying that information, a numerical score is then created and converted into one of five letter grades.

The hospital safety grades are released by the nonprofit group twice a year, in the spring and in the fall.

Leapfrog assigns A,B,C,D and F letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the United States. Leapfrog explains that the safety grade includes 28 measures that are taken together to “produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.”

The group uses performance measures from a variety of sources, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)

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