April 28, 2016

VUH lands top safety marks from Leapfrog Group

Vanderbilt University Hospital (VUH) has been awarded a spring 2016 patient safety grade of “A” from the Leapfrog Group, a coalition of public and private purchasers of employee health coverage that works to encourage health care safety, quality and affordability.

Vanderbilt University Hospital (VUH) has been awarded a spring 2016 patient safety grade of “A” from the Leapfrog Group, a coalition of public and private purchasers of employee health coverage that works to encourage health care safety, quality and affordability.

This is the ninth consecutive time VUH has received the group’s top grade.

Leapfrog’s Hospital Safety Score uses 28 measures of publicly available hospital data to produce a single score representing a hospital’s overall capacity to keep patients safe from infections, injuries and medical errors.

Those measures come from the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey and Health Information Technology Supplement.

“The safety of our patients and quality of the services we offer is tantamount to our continued success as a regional health care leader,” said C. Wright Pinson, MBA, M.D., deputy vice chancellor for Health Affairs and CEO of the Vanderbilt Health System. “I want to congratulate and also express my appreciation to everyone for achieving nine consecutive periods that Leapfrog has awarded Vanderbilt University Hospital a top safety score. Health care delivery is highly dependent on great teamwork and this result clearly speaks to such success.”

In the recent survey, 2,571 hospitals across the nation were assigned grades of A, B, C, D or F for safety, and only 798 received an “A.” The safety score for each hospital can be found here.

The Leapfrog Group also publishes a Top Hospitals list each year in late November. Together, Leapfrog members provide health benefits to more than 37 million Americans in all 50 states.