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Medical Mistakes Kill 1,000 Patients Per Day According to Hospital Safety Group

By Jack H. FarnbauchSeptember 7, 2017

The Leapfrog Group recently released its Spring 2017 Hospital Safety Guide which rates hospitals using a letter grade system.  The Leapfrog Group is a nonprofit watchdog organization that serves as a voice for health care purchasers, using their collective influence to foster positive change in U.S. health care. Leapfrog is the nation’s premier advocate of hospital transparency—collecting, analyzing and disseminating hospital data to inform value-based purchasing. The Leapfrog Group also tracks the number of preventable of medical errors a hospital is responsible for, which is used as a factor when determining the letter grade a hospital receives. 

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, the first and only national healthcare rating focused on errors, accidents and infections, assigns A through F letter grades to general acute-care hospitals. Leapfrog rated 2,639 hospitals, and 823 hospitals earned an A, 706 earned a B, 933 earned a C, and 167 earned a D. Unfortunately, 10 hospitals received an F grade. The five states with the highest percentage of A hospitals in this rating are Maine, Hawaii, Oregon, Wisconsin and Idaho.

Over time there have been significant strides in improving patient safety, said Leapfrog CEO Leah Binder, pointing to a 21 percent decline in hospital-acquired harmful conditions, increased adoption and improved functionality of computerized physician order entry systems, and millions of averted patient harms. But ultimately, these improvements are not enough. Leapfrog contends that 1,000 people a day are estimated to die from medical errors.

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