Hospital Safety Grades Vary In MetroWest, Worcester Areas

WORCESTER, MA — Several hospitals in the MetroWest and Worcester areas received an A grade in hospital safety, according to new fall 2019 ratings released Thursday by the Leapfrog Group. The nonprofit group found that of the more than 2,600 hospitals graded in the country, 33 percent earned an A grade, a 1 percent increase from the last round of safety grades, released in Spring 2019.

The Leapfrog Group's 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.

Maine, Utah, Virginia, Oregon and North Carolina had the highest percentage of hospitals that received an A grade. Three states — Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota — did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

Here are the grades hospitals in our area were given by the Leapfrog Group:

• A — St Vincent Hospital, 123 Summer St., Worcester
• A — Marlborough Hospital, 157 Union St., Marlborough
• A — Milford Regional Medical Center, 14 Prospect St., Milford
• B — MetroWest Medical Center, 115 Lincoln St., Framingham
• C — Leonard Morse Hospital, 67 Union St., Natick
• C — U Mass Memorial Medical Center - Memorial Campus, 119 Belmont St., Worcester
• C — U Mass Memorial Medical Center - University Campus, 55 Lake Ave. North, Worcester

In many categories, Leonard Morse scored well or average. The hospital got low marks for patients developing bed sores and serious falls and injuries. The hospital also got a low grade for the share of doctors that hand-write prescriptions rather than use the Computerized Physician Order Entry system.

Leapfrog gave UMass low marks for the share of patients who develop treatable conditions, like pneumonia. The Memorial Campus ranked worst in the entire nation in accidental cuts or tears. It's important to note, most of the Leapfrog data — including about accidental cuts and tears — was collected mostly between 2016 and 2018.

Patch reached out to UMass and MetroWest Medical Center — which also operates Leonard Morse Hospital — for comment. We will update this story if we hear back.

The release of the Fall 2019 safety grades coincides with the 20th anniversary of a published report that revealed nearly 100,000 lives are lost every year because of preventable medical errors.

“In stark contrast to 20 years ago, we’re now able to pinpoint where the problems are, and that allows us to grade hospitals,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a press release. “It also allows us to better track progress. Encouragingly, we are seeing fewer deaths from the preventable errors we monitor in our grading process.”

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 performance measures taken from federal government data and the group’s own hospital survey to “produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.” The group relies on a panel of experts to select the measures used in the methodology and to develop a scoring system. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)