Five hospitals that are part of Palm Beach (Fla.) Health Network have filed a lawsuit against The Leapfrog Group, alleging the patient safety organization’s rankings are based on flawed methodology.
The complaint, filed April 30 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, claims the rankings unfairly damage the hospitals’ reputations.
“Leapfrog fails to fairly evaluate hospitals that do not complete its hospital survey, and rather than indicating that there is insufficient data to issue a grade to non-participating hospitals, it instead assigns a score equivalent to the ‘Worst Hospital’s Score’ on several measures,” Palm Beach Health Network said in a statement. “This flawed methodology does not accurately reflect hospitals’ performance on patient outcomes.”
The hospitals that filed the complaint are Delray Medical Center in Delray Beach; Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach; Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center; West Boca Medical Center in Boca Raton; and St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach. The complaint was filed a day before The Leapfrog Group published its latest round of hospital safety grades. Three of the hospitals that filed the complaint received an “F” grade and two earned a “D.”
The complaint also alleges Leapfrog’s safety grades are “distorted by undisclosed financial incentives” and penalize hospitals that do not submit data for participation by assigning “artificially low ratings.”
Since 2012, Leapfrog has assigned safety grades biannually to nearly 3,000 acute care hospitals in the U.S. The grades are based on an evaluation of how a hospital performs across 22 national patient safety measures from CMS, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and supplemental data. The group operates the only ratings program that exclusively measures hospitals’ ability to prevent patient harm. Full details on the methodology can be found here.
Leah Binder, president and CEO of Leapfrog, described the lawsuit as an attempt by hospitals to suppress critical safety information from the public.
“When we look at these hospitals’ results from CMS, we see preventable suffering and death far exceeding the national average, and even the national average is too high,” she said in a statement. “These hospitals may wish to withhold their hospitals’ Safety Grades from the community they serve, but Leapfrog intends to fully defend its expert, proven and long-standing methodology to prevent that from happening and publish Grades for all eligible hospitals, including these hospitals.”
This marks the third time a hospital has taken legal action against Leapfrog over its safety grade rankings. In 2017, Chicago-based Saint Anthony Hospital filed a defamation lawsuit, alleging the group inaccurately lowered its grade based on a misinterpretation of data related to electronic medication prescribing. A Cook County judge dismissed the case in 2018, citing Leapfrog’s First Amendment rights.
In a separate 2019 case, NCH Healthcare System in Naples, Fla., sought to block publication of its safety grade. The court denied the request, and NCH later voluntarily dismissed the suit.
