UC San Diego Health Receives Straight A’s From Leapfrog

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The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit organization that advocates quality, safety and transparency in the U.S. health care system, has named UC San Diego Health to its list of hospitals with the highest safety standards in the country. UC San Diego Health hospitals in Hillcrest and La Jolla have received grades of “A” for excellence in safety and quality for the Fall 2019 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade.

“UC San Diego Health is proud to join a select group of hospitals nationally who have met the country’s highest safety standards,” said Patty Maysent, CEO, UC San Diego Health. “Our commitment to excellence in safety has produced continuous, visible results, including decreased infections, decreased length of stay and overall improvement in the health and safety of our patients. This is an impressive team effort at every level of the organization.”

The Leapfrog Group is an independent national watchdog organization driven by employers and other purchasers of health care committed to improving health care quality and safety for consumers and purchasers. The Safety Grade assigns an “A,” “B,” “C,”, “D” or “F” grade to all general hospitals across the country based on their performance in preventing medical errors, injuries, accidents, infections and other harms to patients in their care.

“‘A’ hospitals show us their leadership is protecting patients from preventable medical harm and error,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group. “It takes genuine commitment at every level – from clinicians to administrators to the board of directors – and we congratulate the teams who have worked so hard to earn this ‘A.’”

Developed under the guidance of a national panel of experts, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade employs 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to more than 2,600 U.S. acute-care hospitals twice per year. The Hospital Safety Grade’s methodology is peer-reviewed and fully transparent, and the results are free to the public.

In recent months, UC San Diego Health has received a series of prestigious awards from the nation’s leading quality assessment organizations, including:

• Named a top performer (sixth) in the 2019 Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Award category by Vizient, Inc. This award recognizes UC San Diego Health among the nation’s top ten academic medical centers for achieving the highest levels of quality and patient-centered outcomes for all patients.
• Multiple recognitions from the Integrated Healthcare Association: the Excellence in Healthcare Award, the Ronald P. Bangasser Memorial Award for Quality Improvement and performance in the top 10 percent of all participating physician organizations. UC San Diego Health achieved strong quality results while effectively managing costs, placing itself in the top 50 percent for clinical quality and patient experience and cost for their commercial HMO population.
• In 2018, UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest was named a "Top Teaching Hospital" by The Leapfrog Group. The award is widely acknowledged as one of the most competitive honors that a U.S. hospital can receive.

UC San Diego Health is comprised of UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest and Jacobs Medical Center, Cardiovascular Institute, Moores Cancer Center, Shiley Eye Institute, and the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute, all in La Jolla, as well as primary care and same-day services at clinics throughout Southern California.

In the past six years, UC San Diego Health has invested more than $1.3 billion dollars in patient care facilities for the community. Over the next five years, UC San Diego Health will expand access to its clinicians across the region through a series of primary care and same-day care clinic openings.