The latest batch of Hospital Safety Grades from independent watchdog The Leapfrog Group suggest that patients’ care experiences, which deteriorated during and since the pandemic, may finally be turning a corner.
The twice-yearly ratings, released Wednesday, reflect more than 30 quality measures submitted to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and other data sources for nearly 3,000 U.S. general hospitals.
Among those are five measures related to patient experiences, such as those rating clinicians’ communications or the information provided at discharge. All five had plummeted substantially in Leapfrog’s spring 2022 ratings, which reflected the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and, on average, have decreased further with each subsequent release.
The patient experience measures outlined in the group’s latest release span a reporting period of April 1, 2022, through March 31, 2023. All five showed increases over the average scores reported last fall, with the measure covering “communication about medicines” notching the greatest six-month increase.
“Patient experience is very difficult to influence without delivering better care, so these findings are encouraging,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a release.
Binder said the group was “also pleased to see” a decrease among the measures related to preventable healthcare-associated infections like methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) and central line bloodstream infections (CLABSIs).
The three had reached a head during the fall 2022 Hospital Safety Grades report and have been trending downward since. Ninety-two percent of hospitals included in the survey have improved their performance on at least one of the infections since 2022, the group said, with average scores for CLABSIs decreasing by 34%, CAUTIs by 30% and MRSA by 30%.
“When we look at these positive trends, we see lives saved—and that is gratifying,” Binder said.
More broadly, Leapfrog’s report assigns a letter grade to the reviewed hospitals based on their overall patient safety data. The watchdog encourages patients and families to visit its online tools to compare the ratings of their nearby hospitals when choosing where to receive care.
The latest iteration awarded 29% of hospitals an “A” letter grade, 26% a “B,” 37% a “C,” 7% a “D” and less than 1% an “F.” No new measures were added to the spring 2024 report over those used in the fall 2023 version.
The group’s release also includes shoutouts to states and, for the first time, metro areas with the highest percentage of hospitals that earned “A” grades. Utah (57.7%), Virginia (56.3%) and New Jersey (44.8%) topped the former, whereas the metro areas of Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, Pennsylvania-New Jersey (72.7%), Winston-Salem, North Carolina (71.4%). and New Orleans-Metairie, Louisiaina (68.8%), topped the latter.
Meanwhile, Leapfrog Group did not award an “A” grade to a single hospital in Washington, D.C., nor in six other states: Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.