Clara Maass Hospital Aces Leapfrog ‘Safety Grade’

BELLEVILLE, NJ — The Leapfrog Group released its latest round of hospital “safety grades” earlier this week, including a rating for Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville.

According to the nonprofit, 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.

Learn about the study’s methodology and see a full list of hospitals here. Watch a video about how to use the scores below.

For Spring 2019, Clara Maass Medical Center received an “A” grade. Other recent grades include:

• 2018 Fall - A
• 2018 Spring – A
• 2017 Fall – A
• 2017 Spring – B
• 2016 Fall – B
• 2016 Spring - C

“Our success in earning an ‘A’ again this reporting period is a testament to the outstanding efforts of our physicians, nurses, employees and volunteers to position the quality and safety of our patients as our most important priority,” said Mary Ellen Clyne, president and CEO of Clara Maass Medical Center. “In all that we do, safety is at the forefront.”

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.

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 a 35 percent greater risk respectively.

Nationwide, the nonprofit found that of the more than 2,600 hospitals graded in the country, 32 percent earned an A grade, findings that were unchanged from the group’s last round of rankings released in fall 2018.

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