Stamford Hospital received an “A” in the most recent hospital safety score released by the Washington, D.C.-based The Leapfrog Group.
With grades ranging from A to F, Stamford Hospital was among the 31 percent of hospitals in the U.S. and one of only four hospitals in the state to receive the top grade.
The Leapfrog Hospital Survey dates to 2001 and bills itself as the gold standard for comparing hospitals”™ performance on the national standards of safety, quality and efficiency. The survey this year received responses nationally from 1,501 hospitals.
Stamford Hospital said in a prepared statement the survey is “the only nationally standardized and endorsed set of measures that captures hospital performance in patient safety, quality and resource utilization.”
Improvements in care that appear in the survey results lead to savings of lives and money, the hospital reported.
Leapfrog”™s purchaser clients use survey results to inform their employees and to chart purchasing strategies.
“Hospitals are dedicated to safety and quality on a day-to-day and minute-to-minute basis,” said Dr. Rohit Bhalla, vice president and chief quality officer at Stamford Hospital. “These efforts can be seen in the professionalism and attention to detail of members of interdisciplinary care teams, an adherence to the best evidence and clinical guidelines to improve care, and in the technologies we employ to make care safer, among many other measures. I think that achieving the top grade demonstrates the organization”™s commitment to ensuring quality improvement not just on paper but also in practice.”
The Leapfrog Group uses a subset of the many publicly reported measures, stressing measurements related to patient safety, including the adoption of safe practices, processes to prevent hospital complications and methods to prevent hospital-acquired infections.
Stamford Hospital advances include physicians using computers with medication-safety checking features, utilizing blood-thinning medications and devices to prevent blood clots in nearly all patients, and using large-vein catheters with close attention to sterile technique, “to attempt to minimize the patient”™s risk of infection.”
The not-for-profit Stamford Hospital is affiliated with the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System and is a teaching affiliate of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. The website is stamfordhospital.org.
