Hospital Safety Grades: How Newton-Wellesely Hospital Scored

NEWTON, MA — Out of 59 hospitals graded in the state, 25 received an A grade in hospital safety, 17 received B grades, and the rest C, according to new fall 2019 ratings released Thursday by the Leapfrog Group. How did Newton-Wellesley Hospital do? The group scored Newton-Wellesley Hospital a B. Some of the data came from 2017 through 2018 and the other portion was from 2019.

The Leapfrog Group said its rating system is focused on errors, accidents, injuries and infections. The hospital safety grades are released by the nonprofit group twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. And not all states do well.

"Quality and safety are our top priorities at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. We are proud of the recognition we have received from Leapfrog—most recently a ‘B’ and prior to that an ‘A’ for every report since the program’s inception—as well as from several other external rating organizations," said a spokesperson for Newton-Wellesley Hospital in an email to Patch. "We are steadfast in our commitment to ensuring patient safety every single day."

The release of the Fall 2019 safety grades coincides with the 20th anniversary of a published report that revealed nearly 100,000 lives are lost every year because of preventable medical errors.

“In stark contrast to 20 years ago, we’re now able to pinpoint where the problems are, and that allows us to grade hospitals,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a press release. “It also allows us to better track progress. Encouragingly, we are seeing fewer deaths from the preventable errors we monitor in our grading process.”

Leapfrog assigns A,B,C,D and F letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the United States. Leapfrog explains that the safety grade includes performance measures taken from federal government data and the group’s own hospital survey to “produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.”

The nonprofit group found that of the more than 2,600 hospitals graded in the country, 33 percent earned an A grade, a 1 percent increase from the last round of safety grades, released in Spring 2019. Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota — did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

The group relies on a panel of experts to select the measures used in the methodology and to develop a scoring system. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)