Leapfrog Group Names 'Top Hospitals'

Nine hospitals are recognized as top children's hospitals, 56 as top general hospitals, 29 as top teaching hospitals, and 21 as top rural hospitals.

More than 100 facilities made the "Top Hospitals" lists produced annually and released Tuesday by the non-profit patient safety advocacy organization, Leapfrog Group.

The hospitals listed are among those that have received an "A" grade from Leapfrog's annual survey, which was released in October. Hospitals qualify for the list by having "better systems in place to prevent medication errors, higher quality on maternity care and high-risk procedures, and lower readmission rates."

Four Categories of Hospitals
The top hospitals fall into four categories for the recognition—general, children's, rural, and, for the first time, teaching hospitals. In order to win a place on the list, hospital need to meet a list of criteria, including:

• At least 75% of medication orders must be made through a Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system that can alert physicians to at least 50% of common, serious prescribing errors. "
   
• They must have intensive care units managed by dedicated intensivists on duty during the day and, when not on site or available via telemedicine, the intensivist much return pages at least 95% of the time within five minutes.
   
• They have to comply with Leapfrog's never-event policy for some medical errors. When a never event occurs, the hospital staff has to "apologize to the patient and family, waive all costs related to the event and follow-up care, report the event to an external agency, and conduct a root-cause analysis of how and why the event occurred."
   
• They have to perform above average on Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services' mortality measures for heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia.

Hospitals are not listed by rank, unlike other popular hospital rankings such as U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals rankings.

The two rating programs use some of the same data, but rely on their own collections of measures, and produce different results.

None of the five top rated hospitals on the U.S. News list, teaching hospitals such as Massachusetts General and the Mayo Clinic, are on the Leapfrog list.

In fact, no teaching hospitals from Massachusetts or Minnesota made the list.

However, both the teaching hospital and general hospital Leapfrog lists include numerous California Kaiser Foundation hospital, none of which make the U.S. News "Honor Roll."

View the Leapfrog Group's Top hospitals.