Baystate Medical Center Earns Leapfrog Top Hospital Honor
SPRINGFIELD — Baystate Medical Center’s delivery of quality, safe, and efficient care has placed the Springfield teaching hospital for the fourth consecutive year among an elite group of 60 urban hospitals in the U.S. named Top Hospitals in the Leapfrog Group’s 2012 survey of more than 1,200 hospitals.
Leapfrog’s Top Hospital designation is the most competitive national hospital quality award in the country and recognizes hospitals that deliver the highest-quality care by preventing medical errors, reducing mortality for high-risk procedures such as heart bypass surgery, and reducing hospital readmissions for patients being treated for conditions like pneumonia and heart attacks.
University and other teaching hospitals like Baystate, children’s hospitals, and community hospitals in rural, suburban, and urban settings were all represented in the 2012 rankings. Leapfrog also identified Baystate Medical Center in the top 5{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} of hospitals that completed the survey in 2012.
“Patients deserve to be in the safest hospital possible. Our superior performance recognized in this prestigious survey for the fourth consecutive year, alongside our many other awards and accreditations, confirm for our patients that we meet the highest quality and safety standards among an elite group of top-ranked hospitals in the United States,” said Dr. Evan Benjamin, senior vice president of Healthcare Quality at Baystate Health.
The Leapfrog Survey provides a broad look at a hospital’s quality, safety, and efficiency, and uses some of the most widely accepted and nationally validated measures of hospital performance. Leapfrog also offers healthcare consumers and purchasers unique information not available anywhere else. For example, Leapfrog is the only national source of information on a hospital’s rate of early elective newborn deliveries (Baystate Medical Center has taken a leadership role in working with all Massachusetts birthing hospitals to stop all elective preterm births), adoption of computerized physician order entry to prevent medical errors (Baystate Medical Center began CPOE back in 1991 and has long been a national leader in that area with a virtually 100{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} compliance rate), and several other important measures of inpatient care.
“Leapfrog holds hospitals to the highest standards. By achieving the Top Hospital accolade, Baystate Medical Center has demonstrated exemplary performance across all areas of quality and patient safety that are analyzed on the Leapfrog Hospital Survey. The hospital stands out as one consistently providing safe, high-quality care, and I would be comfortable sending my family to Baystate Medical Center for care,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group.
The announcement of this year’s annual list of Top Hospitals was made on Dec. 4 at Leapfrog’s annual meeting, focusing on transparency as the key to improved hospital safety.“Baystate Medical Center has long been committed to providing high-quality, safe patient care. We actively support transparency efforts as an important means to empowering patients to choose the best care available, and to encourage continuous improvements in care,” said Benjamin.
In addition to making the Top Hospitals list, Baystate Medical Center, as well as its sister hospital, Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield, received ‘A’ grades from Leapfrog on its latest Hospital Safety Score update released on Nov. 28. That program grades hospitals on their overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors. The grades are derived from expert analysis of publicly available data using 26 evidence-based, national measures of hospital safety.
