Lahey Hospital Gets 'A' Safety Grade, But Areas Of Concern Remain

BURLINGTON, MA — Lahey Hospital and Medical Center received a 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. Lahey has earned straight A grades from Leapfrog since Fall, 2017.

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.

While Lahey is a consistently high-scoring hospital, there are still areas of concern. In four out of five infection-related categories, Lahey Hospital got a below average grade, including for blood infections and urinary tract infections. It was also below average on several surgery categories, including death from serious treatable complications. But it was above average across the board in practices to prevent errors and staff-related categories.

Patch has reached out to Lahey Hospital for comment and will update when they respond.

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.

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.)