Lehigh Valley leads nation in patient safety; Harrisburg-Carlisle ranks 13

Lehigh Valley is the leading metro area for health care in the nation and Harrisburg-Carlisle ranked 13th, according to The Leapfrog Group.

The Leapfrog Group, an independent national nonprofit focused on patient safety, today released its spring 2024 Hospital Safety Grades.

The report shows 72.8% of hospitals in Lehigh Valley and 57.1% of hospitals in Harrisburg-Carlisle earned an “A” grade from the group, according to Lehigh Valley Business Coalition on Healthcare (LVBCH), which is the Leapfrog Regional Leader for the Leapfrog Group in Pennsylvania.

“LVBCH would like to recognize the local hospitals to which this recognition can be attributed,” said Carl Seitz, president, LVBCH. “St. Luke’s Hospital Allentown Campus, St. Luke’s Sacred Heart Campus in Allentown, St. Luke’s University Hospital Bethlehem Campus, St. Luke’s Hospital Anderson Campus in Easton, and Lehigh Valley Hospital Hecktown Oaks in Easton all earned “A” grades.

“We would also like to recognize the four Harrisburg-Carlisle hospitals that earned “A” grades: UPMC-Carlisle, UPMC-Harrisburg, UPMC-Community in Harrisburg, and UPMC-West Shore in Mechanicsburg.”

The Leapfrog Group assigns an A, B, C, D or F to nearly 3,000 general hospitals on how well they prevent medical errors, accidents and infections.

“Ranking metro areas for the first time is exciting because it provides us more information about collective hospital safety on a local level,” said President and CEO of The Leapfrog Group Leah Binder. “Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton being ranked #1 is especially impressive. We are grateful to the hospitals in the Lehigh Valley for their excellent work and determination to keep patients safe and prevent unnecessary pain and suffering.”

In addition to assigning letter grades to individual hospitals, The Leapfrog Group also reports best patient safety performance by state. Pennsylvania ranked 7 th with 42.7% of hospitals earning an “A”.

Nationally, patient experience, a set of measures using patient-reported perspectives on hospital care, indicates significant signs of improvement since the fall 2023 Safety Grades, and preventable health care-associated infections show a sustained drop after unprecedented rates during the height of the pandemic, the report shows.

“Patient experience is very difficult to influence without delivering better care, so these findings are encouraging,” said Binder. “We were also pleased to see the decrease in preventable infections, which cause terrible suffering and sometimes death. When we look at these positive trends, we see lives savedand that is gratifying.”

The Leapfrog group measures patient experience through the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey, which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services uses to publicly report patients' perspectives of hospital care.

Of the over 30 measures used to generate Hospital Safety Grades, The Leapfrog Group reports on five patient experience measures that have a direct impact on patient safety outcomes:

• Nurse communication



• Doctor communication



• Hospital staff responsiveness



• Communication about medicines



• Discharge information

Since the start of the pandemic, patient experience has worsened. Binder said this spring has shown the first sign of improvement with all measures significantly improving since fall 2023, but the measures are still far from pre-pandemic levels.

Since Leapfrog reported Hospital Safety Grades in fall 2022, when health care acquired infection rates were at their highest peak since 2016, 92% of hospitals have improved performance on at least one of three dangerous preventable infections, the data shows.

Average grades have declined dramatically:

• Central line-associated bloodstream infectionsdecreased by 34%



• Catheter-associated urinary tract infectionsdecreased by 30%



• Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus decreased by 30%

“While today’s results are promising, patient safety remains a crisis-level hazard in health care. Some hospitals are much better than others at protecting patients from harm, and that’s why we make the Hospital Safety Grade available to the public and why we encourage all hospitals to focus more attention on safety,” said Binder.

“The Hospital Safety Grade empowers patients to choose the safest hospitals in their area,” said Amanda Greene, director of Operations, LVBCH and Leapfrog Regional Leader. “When hospitals are dedicated to transparent reporting and patient safety, they are quite literally saving lives. The employers and purchasers in LVBCH stand with Leapfrog and the work they are doing to protect patients from preventable harms.”

Leapfrog rankings were limited to areas with populations of 500,000 or greater with at least six graded hospitals.

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