Northside Hospital Named Atlanta's Safest

Northside Hospital is Atlanta’s and DeKalb County’s safest hospital, according to a new ranking by the Hospital Safety Score.

The listing was compiled by patient safety experts and administered by The Leapfrog Group, a national, independent nonprofit. Hospital Safety Scores are assigned by Leapfrog to more than 2,500 hospitals across the nation twice annually.

The Hospital Safety Score grades hospitals on how safe they keep their patients from errors, injuries, accidents, and infections. It is peer-reviewed in the Journal of Patient Safety, is free to the public and is to give consumers information they can use to protect themselves and their families when facing a hospital stay.

It used 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce a single A, B, C, D, or F score.

• Process Measures represent how often a hospital gives patients recommended treatment for a given medical condition or procedure. For example, “Use antibiotics right before surgery” measures how often a hospital gives patients an antibiotic within one hour before surgery.
• Structural Measures represent the environment in which patients receive care. For example, “Doctors order medications through a computer” represents whether a hospital uses a special computerized system to prevent medication errors.
• Outcome Measures represent what happens to a patient while receiving care. For example, “Dangerous object left in patient’s body” measures how many times a patient undergoing surgery had a dangerous foreign object, like a sponge or tool, left in his or her body.

Here are the scores listed for hospitals in the city of Atlanta and DeKalb County:

• Grady Memorial Hospital: C
• Atlanta Medical Center: C
• Emory University Hospital Midtown: C
• Piedmont Hospital: C
• Emory University Hospital: B
• DeKalb Medical Center: B
• St. Joseph’s Hospital of Atlanta: C
• Northside Hospital: A