Howard County General Hospital Gets 'B' For Safety

COLUMBIA, MD — Howard County General Hospital received a B for hospital safety, according to new ratings released by the Leapfrog Group. The nonprofit watchdog organization focused its ratings on errors, accidents, injuries and infections.

The grades are released by Leapfrog twice a year, in the spring and in the fall.

Howard County General Hospital earned perfect scores for the following: hand-washing, staff working together to prevent errors, having enough qualified nurses, not leaving air bubbles in the blood during procedures, tracking and reducing risks to patients, using computers to order medications instead of writing them by hand and staffing its intensive care unit with a critical care physician.

It did not fare well when it came to incidences of blood clots, collapsed lungs and accidental cuts and tears after surgery.

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.)

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 from the state because of a federal waiver that exempted Maryland from reporting key safety metrics.

Howard County General Hospital has had a B grade in spring 2019 and fall 2018. It earned an A in spring 2018 and fall 2017.

This time around, no Maryland hospitals got an F. Here's a summary of the grades for the state for spring 2019:

• A — 10 hospitals
• B — 11 hospitals
• C – 14 hospitals
• D — 5 hospitals
• F — 0 hospitals

SEE ALSO: 5 Hospitals Get 'D' In Maryland Hospital Safety Grades

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 with A-grade hospitals. At C and B hospitals, patients on average face an 88 percent and 35 percent greater risk respectively.

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.

SEE ALSO: Howard County General Named One Of Top Hospitals In US

— By Patch editors Feroze Dhanoa and Elizabeth Janney