What does Jersey City have that New York City doesn’t? Two hospitals with Leapfrog Group “A” safety grades

Leapfrog just released its semi-annual hospital safety grades. Incongruities identified in my previous blog posts [here and here] appeared again.

New York City had no A grade hospitals, only four got Bs, and nationally known hospitals such as New York Presbyterian (Columbia and Cornell), New York University, and Mount Sinai received C grades.

Residents of New York City are in luck because several A-rated hospitals are located just across the Hudson River. Four of them—Jersey City’s CarePoint Health-Christ Hospital, Jersey City Medical Center, CarePoint Health-Bayonne Medical Center, and CarePoint Health-Hoboken University Medical Center—aren’t exactly household names, but they scored better on safety than their New York neighbors.

CarePoint has figured out how to achieve a top rating but can’t compare to the numbers of California Kaiser Foundation Hospitals scoring well on multiple Leapfrog evaluations. The current rankings show 19 of 26 Kaiser hospitals in California were A rated.

Good patient safety news you didn’t hear about

In the last five years, there’s been a 21% reduction in hospital acquired conditions (HACs) says a report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This means that patients suffered 3.1 million fewer HACs than if the HAC rate had stayed at the 2010 level.

Since 2011, the decrease in HACs has reduced healthcare costs by an estimated $28.2 billion and has saved almost 125,000 lives.

This graphic summarizes the AHRQ findings.

Central line-associated bloodstream infections have fallen by 91%, and postoperative venous thromboembolism by 76%. Here’s a chart that shows the percent decreases in HACs.

The report said the reasons for these improvements “are not fully understood,” but might be due to the following:

• Financial incentives created by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and other payers’ payment policies,
• Public reporting of hospital-level results,
• Technical assistance offered to hospitals by the Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) program, and
• Technical assistance and catalytic efforts of the HHS PfP [[Pay for Performance] initiative led by CMS.

An thorough Google search found a few articles about this important and positive AHRQ report. Were they in the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, US News, or The Daily Mail?

No. the news could only be found on HealthcareIT Analytics, Fierce Healthcare, the website of the Healthcare Association of New York State, Pharmacy Practice News, and HealthcareIT News where I obtained the multicolored graphic above.

Why do you suppose no major media outlet reported the story?

Good news doesn’t get clicks.