Baptist Health Hospitals Meet Goal of Raising Leapfrog Safety Grades

Baptist Health has always strived to do all the right things to deliver the highest quality and safest care to every patient, every time—and the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade has provided an extra focus for Baptist Health hospitals to aim for perfection.

Based on the continued improvement of the Leapfrog safety grades over the past year, Baptist Health is getting closer to perfection in patient safety as hospitals are seeing improvement by a letter grade in a relatively short period of time.

The goal for 2022 was to improve the Leapfrog score for Baptist Health’s four largest hospitals by one letter grade each. Leapfrog releases scores twice a year, and with the spring letter grades, Baptist Health was able to meet that goal and bring the scores of BHMC-Little Rock, BHMC-Conway, and BH-Fort Smith up by one letter grade.

With the fall 2022 scores, Baptist Health raised North Little Rock by a letter grade as well, and have further improved the overall score at all of our hospitals (even if they do not yet cross the threshold of another letter grade).

And the big news from the scores just released in November is that Baptist Health Medical Center-Little Rock has raised its Leapfrog grade all the way up to an A rating! It takes a true team effort to achieve this distinction from Leapfrog, and everyone on the Little Rock campus contributed to making BHMCLR among the elite hospitals in patient safety. Only a small percentage—less than 10 percent of the hospitals nationwide that participate in Leapfrog—attain an “A” rating.

These grades are thanks to a lot of hard work from a multi-disciplinary team championing the cause and clinical employees throughout the system who were impacted one way or another in this resource-intensive initiative. It has been an “all oars paddling in the same direction” approach to ensuring zero harm to patients.

More importantly than the actual grades is what all these efforts are leading to—patients are experiencing decreased infections, decreased surgical complications, and a safer environment.

Much of the Leapfrog grade is based on last year’s CMS metrics, so the first step was to target the parts of the score that can be corrected in real time—around policy, best practices, hand-hygiene monitoring, and defining the standards we hold ourselves to. Meanwhile, Baptist Health bolstered programs such as CLABSI, CAUTI, communication, and patient safety indicators that address CMS metrics that will affect next year’s score.

Better ICU staffing, computerized physician order entry, detailed safety checklists, and processes with multiple back-up plans to keep patients safe are other prime examples of how focusing time and resources on a project have contributed to achieving results in Leapfrog grading.

Leapfrog is a nonprofit organization founded in 2000 by large employers and other purchasers to help consumers get a better grasp of safety and quality in health care. Leapfrog is all about using transparency as a driver to improve safety and reliability in hospitals.

Baptist Health hospitals are judged by a lot of organizations on a lot of metrics, including finances, satisfaction, efficiency, and even likability. Leapfrog specifically targets patient safety and quality of care. As Baptist Health has renewed and restructured our mission around reliability, the Leapfrog hospital safety grades are a good yardstick by which to measure our progress.

The Leapfrog safety grade uses over 30 performance metrics to produce a single letter grade that represents a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe. By targeting these specific metrics, Baptist Health is able to focus on both the processes and the outcomes for hospitalized patients. The safety grade has served as a magnifying glass to help identify areas where we excel and other areas where we have opportunities to improve safety.

(Because of limitations and exclusions in publicly available data, the Leapfrog hospital safety grade excludes critical access hospitals and rural or small hospitals because there is not enough publicly reported data due to low patient volumes or fewer services.)