UNM Hospital received a D in safety from an industry watchdog group, but a spokesman for the hospital said the numbers are not what they seem.
The D rating came from the Fall 2014 update to the Leapfrog Group’s Hospital Safety Score website, which assigns a standard letter grade to hospitals based on their ability to prevent medical errors.
But UNMH spokesman John Arnold said the hospital doesn’t accept the assessment.
“We chose not to participate in this survey and so we do not think that the D grade is an accurate score for UNMH. We do not think it reflects our commitment to safety at the hospital,” Arnold said.
Leapfrog, a nonprofit industry watchdog, scores more than 2,500 hospitals twice annually by compiling 28 measures of safety data from the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey and Health Information Technology Supplement, according to the hospital safety score website.
These performance measures are analyzed and weighted by the Leapfrog Blue Ribbon Expert Panel based on evidence, opportunity for improvement and impact, according to the website. This panel is made up of six patient safety experts from around the country.
Arnold said that since UNMH did not volunteer their own information to Leapfrog, the data had to be gathered from outside sources, making the conclusions invalid. He said that in at least one measure he was aware of, the third-party data Leapfrog used was inaccurate.
“In this survey, 10 of these (safety measures) would only be accurately determined with information obtained in the survey had we participated,” Arnold said. “Other measures came from some public federal data which was several years old going back as far as 2010, so that could negatively affect the grade.”
The Hospital Safety Score categorizes each measure as either a process/structural measure or an outcome measure and each category accounts for 50 percent of the total score, according to the website.
Process measures represent how often a hospital provides patients with the recommended treatment for a given procedure or condition while structural measures represent the environment in which the patient receives care. Outcome measures score what happens to a patient while receiving care. Review areas include standards in infection control, surgery protocol, staffing and training levels and standardized procedures, according to the website.
Examples of outcome measures included “use antibiotics right before surgery,” “dangerous object left in a patient’s body” and “hand washing.” Hospitals could earn up to a certain number of points delineated to a specific measure for using the correct procedures. UNMH is shown to have either scored below average or simply not reported for almost all of the possible measures.
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According to the numbers attained by Leapfrog, UNMH had the lowest score of any hospital in the nation in two safety categories — having specially trained doctors care for Intensive Care Unit patients, and allowing patients’ surgical wounds to split open after surgery.
UNMH scored above average in four of the categories where data was obtained by Leapfrog.
Arnold said the hospital does score better in assessments that it participates in more actively, but participating in the Leapfrog one would be difficult to complete in terms of staff time and effort.
“We do belong to the University Healthcare Consortium and they have a rigorous evaluation system to assess safety measures in which we do fair b etter,” Arnold said. “These surveys are very resource-intensive as far as committing staff time and resources to completing the surveys, but we are considering participating in the future .”
According to UNMH’s website, University Healthcare Consortium gave the hospital four out of five stars on its 2011 scorecard.
Out of the 15 New Mexico hospitals graded by Hospital Safety Score, three others UNMH received a D rating — Artesia General Hospital, Espanola Hospital and Gila Regional Medical Center.
Out of the 2,500 hospitals scored overall, 148 others also scored a D rating. New Mexico is ranked 28 by the website out of the 42 states represented in the data.
Marielle Dent is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Marielle_Dent.
