Every eligible St. Luke’s University Health Network acute care hospital received an A grade for patient safety in the latest ratings released by The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit organization that evaluates hospitals nationwide.
The fall Hospital Safety Grades, published today, awarded A’s to 11 St. Luke’s campuses: Bethlehem, Allentown, Anderson, Carbon, Easton, Monroe, Miners, Sacred Heart, Upper Bucks, Warren and Geisinger St. Luke’s Hospital. The network’s newest campus, St. Luke’s Grand View, which joined in July, earned a B.
“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.”
Leapfrog assigns letter grades twice a year—each spring and fall—based on a hospital’s performance in preventing medical errors, infections and patient harm. The Hospital Safety Grade is the only national rating system dedicated solely to a hospital’s ability to protect patients from preventable harm. Grades are calculated using 30 measures of publicly available safety data from nearly 3,000 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.”
The new ratings add to a growing list of national recognitions for St. Luke’s. In September, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality identified St. Luke’s as one of the top three U.S. health systems for quality and safety—alongside Houston Methodist and Mayo Clinic—and ranked St. Luke’s #1 overall.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services also awarded St. Luke’s hospitals five stars in its annual hospital quality and safety review. St. Luke’s was the only health network in the Lehigh Valley to receive five stars. Only 8 percent of 4,658 eligible hospitals nationwide earned the top rating.
“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.”
