Silver Cross Hospital Gets 'A' Hospital Safety Grade

NEW LENOX, IL — Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox received an A grade in hospital safety, according to new Spring 2019 ratings released by the Leapfrog Group on Wednesday. The nonprofit group found that of the more than 2,600 hospitals graded in the country, 32 percent earned an A grade, findings that were unchanged from the group’s last round of rankings released in Fall 2018.

Silver Cross has received an 'A' grade from Leapfrog for fall and spring 2016, fall and spring 2017, and fall and spring 2018. In Illinois, 42 hospitals, including 25 in the Chicago area, received an A grade in hospital safety.

The New Lenox hospital scored above average in almost all categories. According to Leapfrog, it scored below average in: doctors order medications through a computer, surgical site infection after colon surgery, surgical wound splits open, death from serious treatable complications, and effective leadership to prevent errors.

The Leapfrog Group explains that its rating system is focused entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections. The hospital safety grades are released by the nonprofit group twice a year, in the spring and in the fall.

Oregon, Virginia, Maine, Massachusetts and Utah had the highest percentage of hospitals that received an A grade. Four states — Wyoming, Arkansas, Delaware, North Dakota — and the District of Columbia did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

Methodology

For this round of rankings, the Leapfrog Group’s research found that patients at hospitals that receive “D” or “F” grades face a 92 percent greater risk of avoidable death compared to “A” hospitals. At “C” and “B” hospitals, patients on average face an 88 percent and a 35 percent greater risk respectively.

The group estimates that if the risk at all hospitals was equivalent to what it is at “A” hospitals, 50,000 lives would have been saved. Overall, the researchers estimate that 160,000 lives are lost every year due to avoidable medical errors. That figure is down from 2016, when the Leapfrog Group estimated there were 205,000 avoidable deaths.

“The good news is that tens of thousands of lives have been saved because of progress on patient safety. The bad news is that there’s still a lot of needless death and harm in American hospitals,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, said in a press release. “Hospitals don’t all have the same track record, so it really matters which hospital people choose, which is the purpose of our Hospital Safety Grade.”

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.)