Riverview Medical Center Gets 'A' In Nonprofit's Safety Ratings

RED BANK, NJ — Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank has received an A grade for patient safety from a nonprofit founded by employers and healthcare providers to track and rate hospital care, the organization announced Tuesday.

The Leapfrog Group, which has been ranking hospitals for several years, announced its Fall 2017 safety grades for more than 2,600 hospitals across the nation, including 68 in New Jersey.

The hospitals were given a letter grade from A through F based on several factors, including medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections. The goal is to determine what a patient's risk of further injury or infection is if they visit a certain hospital, the organization says. Riverview was one of 30 hospitals in New Jersey that received As in the fall ratings.

"Errors and infections in hospitals are the third leading cause of death in America, and people deserve to know which of their hospitals are best at preventing them," Leah Binder, president and CEO of Leapfrog, said in a news release.

Medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections are taken into account by Leapfrog when calculating the grades. The goal of the rankings is to determine a patient's risk of further injury or infection if they visit a certain hospital.

Riverview Medical Center had received an A in the spring and also in the Fall 2016 ratings, a dramatic improvement from the C it received in the Spring 2016 ratings, according to Leapfrog. In the Fall 2017 ratings, the hospital received good scores across the board on efforts to prevent infections, practices to prevent errors, problems with surgery, and safety practices; their only poor scores were on MRSA infections, death from serious treatable infections and accidental cuts, bed sores and responsiveness of hospital staff. Read more here.

Leapfrog's ratings are based on 27 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.

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