The Leapfrog Hospital Survey assesses 1,200 U.S. hospitals on safety, quality and efficiency and measures the extent to which physicians use computers to order prescriptions, whether hospital intensive care units are properly staffed and how well hospitals perform a selection of complex medical procedures.
In 2004, Leapfrog added the Safe Practices Survey, which asked hospitals to self-report on 27 detailed measures of safety. Hospitals are ranked based upon this data.
According to the report, hospital administrators said that the survey is too cumbersome to complete and too vague to properly assess safety.
The JAMA study found that patient death rates among hospitals in the highest quartile of the Leapfrog survey were about the same as those in the lowest quartile. According to the report, the group that performed the JAMA study looked at 155 hospitals that participated in the 2006 Leapfrog survey and found that the in-hospital death rates from lowest to highest quartile were 1.97 percent, 2.04 percent, 1.96 percent and 2 percent, respectively.
Hospital officials said that while safe practices can prevent errors, they are unlikely to prevent a death, according to the report.
Read HealthDay’s report on the JAMA patient safety study.
