RWJ University Hospital Somerset Receives 'A' Safety Grade

SOMERVILLE, NJ — Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Somerset received another A grade in hospital safety this year, according to the new fall 2019 ratings released Thursday by the Leapfrog Group.

The hospital at 110 Rehill Ave. in Somerville also had received an A rating in the Spring 2019, Fall 2018 and a B rating in the Spring 2018.

"We are proud to have received our third consecutive A rating from the Leapfrog Group and our ninth overall. It is a testament to the high quality care provided by our entire team of physicians, nurses and staff," said Kathleen Roberts, spokeswoman for RWJ University Hospital.

The nonprofit 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.

In New Jersey, 12 hospitals got C grades while another 2 got Ds. Efforts to obtain comment from those two hospitals were not immediately successful. For the full list of hospitals click here.

Here are the grades for hospitals in and around Somerset County that were given by the Leapfrog Group:

• Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Somerset, Somerville - A
• Saint Peter's University Hospital, New Brunswick - A
• Morristown Medical Center - A
• Hunterdon Medical Center, Flemington - B
• Overlook Medical Center, Summit - B

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.

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.)

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