2018 Leapfrog FAQs
Leapfrog is a national not-for-profit organization that promotes transparency about safety and quality of health care in the U.S. As part of that mission, Leapfrog publishes a Hospital Safety Grade two times a year. Stanford Health Care supports transparency and voluntarily participates in Leapfrog’s annual survey that’s used in calculating the Safety Grade, but also understands the limitations of their methodology.
Leapfrog uses only Medicare Data so only a portion of our patients are represented in this report. The data are also very old (July 2014 – September 2015 for this report) and don’t represent our current outcomes. Additionally, their methodology doesn’t adequately risk adjust for the complexity of patients and type of care provided by academic medical centers such as Stanford.
Based on the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade Methodology, Stanford Health Care received a “C” for the current period but it’s important to note that, based on the U.S. News and World Report (another highly reputable benchmarking organizing that uses similar data from the similar period), we were ranked 9th in the Nation and best in the metropolitan area. Although we support all public reporting and transparency, we urge the consumers of these reports to take a closer look at the methodology and take the time to understand exactly what these scores represent.
Because we believe it’s important to evaluate the care of ALL our patients, not only Medicare, and because we want to know how we’re performing today, we have selected to focus on Vizient rankings. The availability of more current information and an evaluation of all our patients helps us identify current issues, and when necessary, focus our attention on improving outcomes we are currently struggling with, not outcomes that may have been a problem in the past, but have since been resolved.
Vizient was founded in 2015 and combined three distinct organizations: (1) VHA Inc.; (2) University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) and (3) Novation. Vizient is an alliance of over 100 nation's leading academic medical centers. Their members, like Stanford Health Care, are consistently ranked as Best Hospitals by the U.S. News & World Report. They are a healthcare performance improvement company that has its own ranking mechanism and recognizes top performers in three different categories.
Our current overall rank is 26th out of 95 Comprehensive Academic Medical Centers. Our rank is more favorable in the Mortality Domain (17th out of 95) and the Safety Domain (14th out of 95). Saving our patient’s lives and always keeping them safe is our top priority. We have numerous performance improvement projects aimed at getting better and continuously improving our patient safety and mortality measures. Read about our quality initiatives »