Beth Israel Deaconess Needham Hospital Receives 'C' Safety Grade

NEEDHAM, MA — Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Needham received a C 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 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.

A spokeswoman for BID Needham said the hospital does not believe the Leapfrog grade accurately reflects the hospital's safety and care. Among the areas where Leapfrog rated BID Needham below average was in infection care, where several subcategories researched were listed as "not available." The designation means the hospital doesn't have the data for the specific measure, possibly because the measure is related to a service the hospital does not provide. A “Not Available” result does not mean that the hospital withheld information from the public.

In a statement regarding the Leapfrog grade, a spokeswoman for BID Needham said in part:

The entire BID-Needham team is focused on providing safe, high-quality care for our patients and their families. We take great pride in our above-the-national-average 4-out-of-5 star quality ranking by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, as well as our full accreditation in good standing with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, and our 2019 American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke Gold Quality Achievement Award. Although we do not believe that our most recent Leapfrog grade accurately reflects the safe, high-quality care we provide, we always embrace opportunities to further strengthen our robust safety and quality initiatives.

BID Needham was graded a B this past spring and held an A grade during spring 2018 and 2017. Twenty-five Massachusetts hospitals received an A grade in hospital safety.

BID Needham's full score and a breakdown of the results can be found on Leapfrogs's website.

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.)