In what’s surely every patient’s nightmare, foreign objects such as surgical sponges sometimes get left behind inside the body during surgery.
It happens only rarely, but to help avoid it, health care workers have traditionally counted surgical sponges during procedures to make sure they’re all accounted for. Some hospitals, including Rush University Medical Center, have added a second layer of protection: using sponges with radio frequency identification technology. That way, at the end of a surgery, operating room staff can wave a wand over the patient and get an alert if any sponges are still inside.
“This is just a second layer of defense,” said Dr. Brian Stein, chief quality officer for the Rush University System for Health.
It’s just one example of the types of measures Illinois hospitals have implemented in recent years to improve patient safety — an effort that may be paying off, according to the latest Leapfrog Group hospital safety grades. Illinois now ranks 20th in the country, up from 30th a year ago, for the percentage of its hospitals earning A grades for safety.
It’s possible that some Illinois hospitals made changes in hopes of improving patient safety and boosting their grades in order to attract more patients, said Cheryl Larson, president and CEO of the Midwest Business Group on Health, which helps facilitate the Leapfrog hospital survey in Illinois. “That’s the whole point of this, is driving people to the best, safest hospitals in the state of Illinois,” Larson said.
Though Illinois improved its ranking overall, the ratings were a mixed bag for individual Illinois hospitals, with more hospitals notching A grades but also more earning Ds than when grades were last released in the fall.
In all, 35 Illinois hospitals earned A grades and 15 earned Ds, according to Leapfrog, a nonprofit founded by large employers and other organizations that buy health insurance.
One Illinois hospital, HSHS St. Mary’s Hospital in Decatur, got an F for the second consecutive time. A hospital spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Leapfrog releases safety grades twice a year and is one of a number of organizations that rates hospitals, aiming to help consumers and employers that buy health insurance make sense of a thicket of complex data about hospitals. Low-performing hospitals often decry the ratings systems, criticizing them for not painting a full picture of their care, while high-performing hospitals tout their ratings in ads, as they compete with other hospitals for patients.
Leapfrog bases its grades on 22 safety measures, including hand hygiene, falls and trauma, and death rates among surgical patients with serious but treatable complications. Leapfrog gathers its data from the federal government, a survey it sends to hospitals and other data sources.
Experts urge consumers to use the ratings as just one piece of information when choosing where to seek care, along with considerations such as their doctors’ recommendations, personal experiences and which hospitals are in-network with their health insurers.
This year, five of the 15 Illinois hospitals that got Ds were in the Chicago area: Weiss Memorial Hospital, Roseland Community Hospital, Insight Hospital and Medical Center and Community First Medical Center in Chicago and West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park.
A spokesperson for Insight said in a statement that Leapfrog’s “findings and the hospital’s data are not aligned because the hospital opted out of self-reporting due to time constraints.” The spokesperson said the inconsistencies are related to reporting and coding issues, rather than patient safety.
None of the other four D hospitals responded to requests for comment.
In a bright spot, three Illinois hospitals are among just 11 in the country to score straight A grades since Leapfrog began grading hospitals 13 years ago: Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital, Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield and the University of Chicago Medical Center.
All but one of Endeavor’s eligible hospitals scored As with Leapfrog. Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital in Chicago received a C.
It’s important to Endeavor, which has expanded rapidly in recent years, to ensure consistent quality and safety across its hospitals, said Dr. Lakshmi Halasyamani, chief clinical officer at Endeavor. One way it does that is by convening groups of experts across the system to drive improvement and consistency in areas such as patient experience and reducing infections, she said.
“One of the things we’re really striving for as a system is to ensure every patient, no matter what door they come through, has an equal chance for the best outcome,” Halasyamani said.
Four of Endeavor’s hospitals — in Evanston, Glenview, Highland Park and Elmhurst — also were cited by Leapfrog for achieving A grades for at least five consecutive rounds of grading.
Other Illinois hospitals that also got straight As for at least the last five grading periods are UChicago Medicine AdventHealth La Grange, Northwestern Medicine McHenry Hospital, Rush University Medical Center, UChicago Medicine AdventHealth Hinsdale, Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital, Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital in Geneva, Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox, Northwestern Medicine Kishwaukee Hospital in DeKalb, UChicago Medicine AdventHealth Bolingbrook and Northwestern Medicine Huntley Hospital.
That kind of consistency, as well as high marks across ratings systems, is a sign of a hospital’s quality, said Stein, with Rush.
Organizations including U.S. News & World Report, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Vizient and Healthgrades also evaluate hospitals, sometimes with different results for the same hospitals.
“No one of (the rating systems) is perfect but I think when you see hospitals perform well across the gamut of ratings and rankings, that should send a strong signal to patients and their families about the commitment of a hospital to safety and quality,” Stein said.
Leapfrog ranked Utah as the top state in the country for the percentage of its hospitals earning A grades.
