MD Hospital Safety Grades: 5 Hospitals Get 'D'

Ten Maryland hospitals received an A grade in hospital safety, according to new ratings released by the Leapfrog Group. This time around, no Maryland hospitals got an F, but five were given a D, 14 got a C and 11 received B grades.

The nonprofit Leapfrog Group focused its ratings entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections. The hospital safety grades are released by the organization twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. Of the more than 2,600 hospitals graded in the country, the ratings showed that 32 percent earned an A grade, unchanged from the last round of rankings in fall 2018.

Maryland, on the other hand, saw improvement; the spring rankings indicated 25 percent of the state's hospitals earned As, up from 20 percent in the fall 2018 list.

Leapfrog began including Maryland in its rankings in 2017. Before that, the nonprofit watchdog — which has been compiling its rankings since 2012 —was unable to obtain data at a national level because of a federal waiver that exempted Maryland from reporting key safety metrics.

Initially, Maryland had one hospital with an F in fall 2017, and a different hospital that received the lone F in spring 2018. Since fall 2018, there have been zero Maryland hospitals with F scores, and grades across the state have improved overall.

For the spring 2019 hospital safety grades, 10 Maryland hospitals received an A — up from eight in fall 2018. The number of Ds decreased from seven to five. Other grades did not change.

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

Here are the grades Maryland hospitals were given by the Leapfrog Group:

A Grades

• Anne Arundel Medical Center, Annapolis
• Greater Baltimore Medical Center, Towson/Baltimore
• Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, Baltimore
• The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
• MedStar St. Mary's Hospital, Leondardtown
• Mercy Medical Center, Baltimore
• Peninsula Regional Medical Center, Salisbury
• Suburban Hospital, Bethesda
• University of Maryland Charles Regional Medical Center, La Plata
• University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center, Towson

B Grades

• Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center, Rockville
• Adventist HealthCare Washington Adventist Hospital, Takoma Park
• CalvertHealth Medical Center, Prince Frederick
• Carroll Hospital Center, Westminster
• Frederick Memorial Hospital, Frederick
• Garrett Regional Medical Center, Oakland
• Howard County General Hospital, Columbia
• MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center, Baltimore
• MedStar Montgomery Medical Center, Olney
• UM Baltimore Washington Medical Center, Glen Burnie
• Western Maryland Regional Medical Center, Cumberland

C Grades

• Bon Secours Hospital, Baltimore
• Fort Washington Medical Center, Fort Washington
• MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital, Baltimore
• MedStar Harbor Hospital, Baltimore
• MedStar Southern Maryland Hospital Center, Clinton
• MedStar Union Memorial Hospital, Baltimore
• Meritus Medical Center, Hagerstown
• Northwest Hospital, Randallstown
• Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, Baltimore
• Union Hospital, Elkton
• University of Maryland Harford Memorial Hospital, Havre de Grace
• University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore
• University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus, Baltimore
• University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Medical Center, Bel Air

D Grades

• Doctors Community Hospital, Lanham
• Holy Cross Germantown Hospital, Germantown
• Holy Cross Hospital, Silver Spring
• St. Agnes Hospital, Baltimore
• University of Maryland Prince George's Hospital Center, Cheverly

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 35 percent greater risk respectively.

The group estimates that if the risk at all hospitals was equivalent to what it is at A hospitals, then 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.)

— By Patch editors Feroze Dhanoa and Elizabeth Janney