In the fall 2015 Hospital Safety Scores report recently released by The
Leapfrog Group, the Southeast Georgia Health System Camden Campus earned
a letter grade of “A” and the Brunswick Campus earned a “B”
for their efforts to protect patients from preventable medical errors,
injuries and infections within the hospital.
“Our team members and physicians continually look for opportunities
to increase patient safety,” says Michael D. Scherneck, president
& CEO, Southeast Georgia Health System. “The grades are evidence
of their dedication and emphasis on providing quality care to the communities
we serve.”
The Hospital Safety Score assigns letter grades of A, B, C, D and F to
more than 2,500 hospitals twice a year; 69 Georgia hospitals were included
in the survey, with only 24 receiving an “A”.
The Leapfrog Group is a non-profit organization committed to driving quality,
safety and transparency in the U.S. health system. The Hospital Safety
Score first launched in June 2012.
The Hospital Safety Score uses national performance measures from the Leapfrog
Hospital Survey, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ),
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the American Hospital Association’s
Annual Survey and Health Information Technology Supplement. Taken together,
those performance measures produce a single score representing a hospital’s
overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and
medical errors. The Hospital Safety Score includes 28 measures, all currently
in use by national measurement and reporting programs. The methodology
has been peer reviewed and published in the Journal of Patient Safety.
The Hospital Safety Score website,
www.hospitalsafetyscore.org, allows users to view a hospital’s current score alongside its previous
scores over the past three years, so that consumers can evaluate whether
the hospital has maintained consistently strong performance or shown a
pattern of improvement.