14 MD Hospitals Get 'A' Rating On New Safety Grades: See Full List

MARYLAND — Fourteen Maryland medical centers scored top ratings 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.

These Maryland hospitals received “A” grades this spring:

• University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson (Fall 2023: A)
• Adventist HealthCare White Oak Medical Center in Silver Spring (Fall 2023: A)
• Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis (Fall 2023: A)
• MedStar St. Mary's Hospital in Leonardtown (Fall 2023: C)
• ChristianaCare - Union Hospital in Elkton (Fall 2023: A)
• MedStar Harbor Hospital in Baltimore (Fall 2023: A)
• University of Maryland Charles Regional Medical Center in La Plata (Fall 2023: C)
• MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital in Baltimore (Fall 2023: A)
• Adventist HealthCare Fort Washington Medical Center in Fort Washington (Fall 2023: B)
• Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda (Fall 2023: No Grade)
• TidalHealth Peninsula Regional, Inc. in Salisbury (Fall 2023: A)
• UPMC Western Maryland in Cumberland (Fall 2023: A)
• Garrett Regional Medical Center in Oakland (Fall 2023: A)
• Meritus Medical Center in Hagerstown (Fall 2023: A)

“Zero harm is the goal of every team member,” UM St. Joseph Medical Center President and CEO Dr. Thomas B. Smyth said in a press release. “UM St. Joseph, in lockstep with our UMMS colleagues, is committed to creating a Culture of Safety that supports consistently good outcomes and exceptional patient experiences. Our latest Leapfrog recognition affirms that our patients, their families and our community can confidently turn to us for reliably safe, effective and compassionate care. We are proud of this enduring and worthwhile work.”

Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center also cheered its grade.

“Earning consistent ‘Straight A’s’ from Leapfrog demonstrates our on-going dedication to delivering safe, high-quality care, and exceptional patient experiences,” LHAAMC President Sherry Perkins said in a press release. “This is emphasized as we prepare to celebrate Nurses Week and Hospital Week, a timely reminder that throughout our hospital’s nearly 125-year history, our staff, physicians, and volunteers always prioritize the care of our patients, ensuring we meet the health care needs of our community.”

Overall, Maryland had:

• 13 hospitals that earned “B” grades
• 13 hospitals that earned “C” grades
• 1 hospital that earned a “D” grade
• 0 hospitals that earned an “F” grade
• 2 hospitals were not graded

Here are the grades for those hospitals:

• B: University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore (Fall 2023: B)
• B: The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (Fall 2023: A)
• B: Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore (Fall 2023: C)
• B: MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center in Baltimore (Fall 2023: B)
• B: MedStar Montgomery Medical Center in Olney (Fall 2023: C)
• B: Suburban Hospital in Bethesda (Fall 2023: C)
• B: MedStar Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore (Fall 2023: A)
• B: CalvertHealth Medical Center in Prince Frederick (Fall 2023: B)
• B: Northwest Hospital in Randallstown (Fall 2023: B)
• B: UM Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Glen Burnie (Fall 2023: C)
• B: Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson (Fall 2023: B)
• B: Johns Hopkins Howard County General Hospital in Columbia (Fall 2023: C)
• B: University of Maryland Shore Medical Center at Easton in Easton (Fall 2023: A)
• C: University of Maryland Capital Region Medical Center in Upper Marlboro (Fall 2023: D)
• C: Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring (Fall 2023: C)
• C: Frederick Health Hospital in Frederick (Fall 2023: C)
• C: Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore (Fall 2023: B)
• C: Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore (Fall 2023: B)
• C: Carroll Hospital Center in Westminster (Fall 2023: C)
• C: University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus in Baltimore (Fall 2023: C)
• C: University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air (Fall 2023: C)
• C: Luminis Health Doctors Community Medical Center in Lanham (Fall 2023: C)
• C: MedStar Southern Maryland Hospital Center in Clinton (Fall 2023: C)
• C: Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville (Fall 2023: B)
• C: Holy Cross Germantown Hospital in Germantown (Fall 2023: C)
• C: Atlantic General Hospital in Berlin (Fall 2023: C)
• D: Sinai Hospital of Baltimore (Fall 2023: C)

Sinai Hospital, which got the state's only “D” grade, issued this statement to Patch:

“We are disappointed by the current Leapfrog rating, which does not reflect the standard of quality of care we provide our patients at Sinai Hospital every day. We are strongly committed to patient safety and quality, with a number of improvement initiatives underway that are not reflected in the data dating back to 2020 used for this grade. In an analysis of the most recent ratings, we uncovered some errors in the Sinai Hospital data, artificially depressing the score, with Leapfrog unable to adjust the rating.

“We are confident that our initiatives around patient safety and quality will result in an improved score for Sinai Hospital in the future. Every day we hear from patients and their families about the excellent, quality care they receive at Sinai, and we are so proud of our teams that were recognized with three awards for patient safety innovation last week from the Maryland Patient Safety Center.”

Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital in Baltimore was not graded because it is a children's medical center. University of Maryland Shore Medical Center at Chestertown was not graded because there was missing data.

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.

Neither the Baltimore nor District of Columbia metro areas were ranked in the top 25.

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.”