Dive Brief:
- The Leapgrog Group, a national nonprofit organization focused on improving the quality and safety of American healthcare, has released its 2015 Top Hospitals list.
- There are 98 hospitals which qualified for the list this year, with 12 children's hospitals, 24 rural hospitals and 62 urban hospitals.
- Top hospitals have lower infection rates, higher survival rates for high-risk procedures, decreased lengths of stay and fewer readmissions. Additional areas where top hospitals excel also include maternity care, prevention of medication errors, and appropriate staffing to ensure care quality.
Dive Insight:
The annual Leapfrog Hospital Survey assesses hospital safety, quality and efficiency based on national performance measures. The survey provides a benchmark for hospitals' progress in improving these measures. Survey results are publicly reported by participating hospitals each month on the Leapfrog website.
This year's survey results included top hospitals in New Hampshire and Utah for the first time, while California, Maine, and Massachusetts continue to have high numbers of top hospitals with 21, 6, and 5, respectively.
The survey also provides a comprehensive view of patients' experiences at individual hospitals.
Healthcare Dive recently reported about the Agency for Healthcare in Research and Quality's new National Readmissions Database, which will serve to analyze national hospital readmission rates.
Efforts to improve safer healthcare systems has gotten a boost from the ACA, with Medicare payment incentives as well as HHS' Partnership for Patients Initiative. This partnership involves 17 organizations working with more than 3,700 U.S. hospitals to reduce preventable hospital-acquired conditions and readmissions. In fact, an HHS report released last December reported 87,000 fewer patients died in hospitals and close to $20 billion in healthcare costs were saved due to reduced hospital-acquired conditions between 2010 and 2014.