Ashtabula County Medical Center received an “A” for patient safety on the recently-released Hospital Safety Score. It is the only hospital in Ashtabula and Lake counties to receive the “A” grade.
The Hospital Safety Score is compiled under the guidance of the nation’s leading experts on patient safety and is administered by The Leapfrog Group (Leapfrog), an independent industry watchdog. It is designed to rate how well hospitals protect patients from accidents, errors, injuries and infections. The first and only hospital safety rating to be peer-reviewed in the Journal of Patient Safety, the Score is free to the public and gives consumers information they can use to protect themselves and their families when facing a hospital stay.
“We are proud to be in the top third in the nation for hospital safety,” said ACMC President & CEO Michael Habowski. “The data used in the scoring process is unbiased – we don’t choose which data to report. We don’t even choose whether or not to participate in the survey. The Leapfrog Group pulls the data for all hospitals, so the results of this survey are truly independent.”
Habowski added, “This score is not a reflection of just one year. It comprises almost three years of outcomes-based information that shows a consistent pattern of health safety for our patients.” For example, no patient at ACMC has developed a central-line infection since 2010, and there has not been a case of ventilator-acquired pneumonia in seven years.
“Safety should come first for our families when we pick a hospital, because errors and infections are common and deadly,” said Leah Binder, president & CEO of The Leapfrog Group, which produces the Hospital Safety Score. “No hospital is perfect, but we congratulate the Board, clinicians, administration, and Caregivers of ACMC for achieving an “A” and showing us that you made the well-being of your patients your top priority.”
Calculated under the guidance of Leapfrog’s Blue Ribbon Expert Panel, the Hospital Safety Score uses 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce a score of “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” or “F”. The score represents a hospital’s overall capacity to keep patients safe from preventable harm. More than 2,500 U.S. hospitals were assigned scores in spring 2014, with about 32-percent receiving an “A” grade. The Hospital Safety Score is fully transparent, and its website offers a full analysis of the data and methodology used in determining grades.
To see how ACMC’s score compares locally and nationally, and to access safety tips for patients and their loved ones, visit the Hospital Safety Score website at www.hospitalsafetyscore.org. Consumers can also go to www.hospitalsafetyscore.org for a free download of the Hospital Safety Score app.
About The Leapfrog Group
The Hospital Safety Score (www.hospitalsafetyscore.org) is an initiative of The Leapfrog Group (www.leapfroggroup.org), a national nonprofit organization using the collective leverage of large purchasers of health care to initiate breakthrough improvements in the safety, quality and affordability of health care for Americans. The flagship Leapfrog Hospital Survey allows purchasers to structure their contracts and purchasing to reward the highest performing hospitals. The Leapfrog Group was founded in November 2000 with support from the Business Roundtable and national funders and is now independently operated with support from its purchaser and other members.