Last month, we announced spring 2024 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades. The new data shows patients report that their experiences in America’s hospitals are improving for the first time since the pandemic—but hospitals still have a long way to go. Research tells us that better patient experience leads to safer care and better outcomes, so we’re encouraged by these findings. We’re also pleased to see a decrease in preventable infections in hospitals. These infections can cause terrible suffering, longer hospital stays, and sometimes even death.
The hospital a patient chooses for care can literally be a life-or-death decision. Over 500 people die every single day in the United States from errors in hospitals—many of which are fully preventable. Hospitals that do better on the Hospital Safety Grade have good systems in place to protect patients from errors, accidents, and infections.
That’s why it’s always been free to access Hospital Safety Grades on our website. We do this as a public service and never put up a pay wall. We want everyone to have easy access to this life-saving data. Visit HospitalSafetyGrade.org to see how your local hospitals perform.
If you’ve never used the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, it is an “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” or “F” assigned to over 3,000 general hospitals in the U.S. twice annually. It is the only rating program focused exclusively on how safe hospitals are for their patients. The Hospital Safety Grade uses a public, peer-reviewed methodology, calculated by top patient safety experts under the guidance of a National Expert Panel, and is 100% transparent and free to the public. Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers estimate that patients are twice as likely to die of a preventable problem at a C, D, or F hospital than an A hospital, and over 50,000 lives would be saved if all hospitals performed the way A hospitals did.