Unlike some other hospital rating schemes, Leapfrog’s does not factor in reputation. You won’t find any of the usual suspects on Leapfrog’s list. Instead, Leapfrog uses surveys of hospitals and publicly available quality and safety data.
Leapfrog’s top 98 included 62 urban, 24 rural, and 12 children’s hospitals. Of the 86 urban and rural hospitals, only three were university hospitals—University of California Davis Medical Center, University of California Irvine Medical Center, and University of Tennessee Medical Center.
New York managed to place only one hospital on the Leapfrog list.
Other interesting anomalies are that for several states such as Connecticut, Indiana, and Maryland, no hospitals made the list, and of the 21 California hospitals that did, 17 are Kaiser-affiliated. Looks like Kaiser knows how to play the game.
