21 GA Hospitals Get 'A' Rating On New Safety Grades: See Full List

GEORGIA — Twenty-one hospitals in Georgia were given top safety grades in The Leapfrog Group’s spring 2024 Hospital Safety Grades released Wednesday.

The independent, nonprofit watchdog group assigned safety grades, ranging from “A” to “F,” for 3,000 general hospitals on how well they prevent medical errors, accidents and infections.

In Georgia, hospitals receiving the top letter grade were:

• Wellstar West Georgia Medical Center, Lagrange: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Piedmont Newton Hospital, Covington: up from B grade in fall 2023
• Piedmont Augusta Hospital, Augusta: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Wellstar Kennestone Medical Center, Marietta: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Memorial Health University Medical Center, Savannah: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Wellstar Paulding Hospital, Hiram: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Piedmont Columbus Regional Midtown, Columbus: up from B grade in fall 2023
• Colquitt Regional Medical Center, Moultrie: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Fairview Park Hospital, Dublin: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Memorial Health Meadows Hospital, Vidalia: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Piedmont Macon Medical Center, Macon: same as A grade in fall 2023
• AdventHealth Redmond, Rome: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Doctors Hospital of Augusta, Augusta: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Piedmont Macon North Hospital, Macon: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Piedmont Fayette Hospital, Fayetteville: up from B grade in fall 2023
• Piedmont Mountainside Hospital, Jasper: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Piedmont Columbus Regional Northside, Columbus: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Tift Regional Medical Center, Tifton: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Memorial Satilla Health, Waycross: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Coffee Regional Medical Center, Douglas: same as A grade in fall 2023
• Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center, Athens: same as A grade in fall 2023

Overall, Georgia had:

• 22 hospitals that earned “B” grades;
• 33 hospitals that earned “C” grades;
• 6 hospitals that earned “D” grades

The Leapfrog Group, which grades hospitals twice a year, also ranked the 10 states with the highest number of “A” hospitals. Utah tops the list, followed by Virginia, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Alaska, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Maine, respectively.

For the first time this spring, the watchdog ranked the top 25 metropolitan statistical reporting areas according to the number of “A” hospitals. The top three metro areas are Allentown, Pennsylvania; Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Nationwide, hospitals showed improvements over their fall 2023 performance in both reducing hospital-acquired infections and improving patient experiences, the report said.

Hospital-acquired infections and preventable errors kill about 250,000 people a year in the United States, making patient safety problems the nation’s third-leading cause of death, according to a summary of peer-reviewed research published in the global health care journal BMJ.

Hospital-acquired infections soared to levels not seen since 2016 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since that spike, 92 percent of hospitals showed improved performance on at least one of three dangerous infections, the report said.

Central line-associated bloodstream infections were down by 34 percent, and both catheter-associated urinary tract infections and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections decreased by 30 percent.

Despite the improvements, “patient safety remains a crisis-level hazard in health care,” Leapfrog Group president and CEO Leah Binder said in a news release.

“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,” Binder said.

Patient experiences have worsened since the pandemic, and while the spring report shows improvement, patients don’t report the same level of confidence they had before the pandemic, according to the report.

Patient experience is measured through the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to publicly report how hospital patients measure the care they received.

The five measures are nurse communication, doctor communication, hospital staff responsiveness, communication about medicines and discharge information.

“Patient experience is very difficult to influence without delivering better care, so these findings are encouraging,” Binder said. “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 saved — and that is gratifying.”