St. Luke's Hospitals Earn A Grades for Safety

The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit health care ratings organization, today released new Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades, awarding A’s to every eligible legacy St. Luke’s acute care hospital.

The 11 campuses – Bethlehem, Allentown, Anderson, Carbon, Easton, Monroe, Miners, Sacred Heart, Upper Bucks and Warren, as well as Geisinger St. Luke’s Hospital – were among a select group of hospitals across the nation awarded an A for their commitment to keeping patients safe and meeting the highest safety standards in the nation.

“You know St. Luke’s is truly awesome because everyone is saying it,” said Donna Sabol, St. Luke’s Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer. "This month it’s Leapfrog giving St. Luke’s A grades. Last month it was the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which ranked St. Luke’s the #1 health system in the country for quality and safety, ahead of the nationally renowned institutions Houston Methodist and the Mayo Clinic, which rounded out the top three.”

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade assigns letter grades of A, B, C, D and F twice annually – in the spring and fall – to hospitals nationwide based on their performance in preventing medical errors, infections and other harms.

St. Luke's Grand View, which joined St. Luke’s in July, received a B grade.

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is the only rating solely focused on a hospital’s ability to protect patients from preventable errors, accidents, injuries and infections. Developed under the guidance of a panel of national experts, it uses 30 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to nearly 3,000 U.S. hospitals.

“Preventable deaths and harm in hospitals have been a major policy concern for decades,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of Leapfrog. “Significant variation in performance remains across U.S. hospitals. ... All hospitals are not the same.”

In September, the federal AHRQ recognized St. Luke’s alongside national heavyweights Houston Methodist and the Mayo Clinic as the nation’s three high performing health systems for safety and quality, one of three health care systems in the country with multiple hospitals demonstrating the high levels of quality and safety performance. Of the three, St. Luke’s was ranked #1.

St Luke’s high marks from Leapfrog echo the assessment in August by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS).

In its annual quality and safety hospital review, CMS awarded St. Luke’s hospitals the highest possible quality rating of five stars. St. Luke’s was the only health network in the Lehigh Valley to receive five-star ratings.

Nationwide, an elite 8 percent of 4,658 eligible hospitals earned five stars.

“Straight A’s and five stars – St. Luke’s is the only health network in Lehigh Valley to ever receive such high marks from both CMS and Leapfrog,” Sabol noted, “and that is a fact.”