The Leapfrog Group Releases its Spring 2025 Hospital Safety Grades
Six states hold the highest percentage of A grades.
Image credit: Tom Fisk
Today, the Leapfrog Group released its Spring 2025 Hospital Safety Grades assigning letter grades to each state. States with the highest percentage of A grades for this cycle are Utah, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, South Carolina and Virginia.1 Utah ranked number 1 for the fourth consecutive safety grade round, and ties for first among states with the highest percentage of Straight A hospitals. 1 Washington, DC ranked number 11 for percentage of A hospitals for spring 2025, marking a significant improvement after years of ranking lowest among states. Conversely, there were no A hospitals in Iowa, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.
Safety Grade Criteria
The biannual Safety Grade is an “A,” “B,” “C,” “D” or “F” assigned to all general hospitals in the United States based on their ability to protect patients from medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections.1 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades are assigned to nearly 3,000 general acute-care hospitals across the nation twice annually. They use up to 30 national performance measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and information from other supplemental data sources. Taken together, those performance measures produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.2
The safety grade is the only hospital ratings program focused exclusively on preventing medical errors and patient harm. It is updated biannually in the fall and spring, offering the public a reliable, independent assessment of hospital safety. The grades are determined by public, peer-reviewed methodology, calculated by top patient safety experts under the guidance of a national expert panel.1
Individual Hospitals Celebrated
Within the grading, there were single hospitals that have shown consistency through the years and were noted. Among the straight A hospitals are a group of 11 hospitals that earned A’s for all 27 grading rounds —13 years. The all-time Straight A hospitals are Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital (Illinois), French Hospital Medical Center (California), Inova Loudoun Hospital (Virginia), Kaiser Permanente Orange County-Anaheim Medical Center (California), Mayo Clinic-Phoenix (Arizona), Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital (Illinois), Saint Anne's Hospital (Massachusetts), Sentara CarePlex Hospital (Virginia), Sentara Leigh Hospital (Virginia), University of Chicago Medical Center (Illinois) and Virginia Mason Medical Center (Washington).
“All hospitals should be proud to earn an ‘A,’ but they should not rest on that laurel. Patient safety is a relentless, never-ending quest to put patients first,” Leah Binder, president and CEO, The Leapfrog Group, said in a statement. “That’s why Leapfrog is highlighting the hospitals across the U.S. that have earned Straight A’s for over two years. Sustaining an A over multiple years reflects a deep-rooted commitment to patient safety.”1
Hospital Errors
One calculation said there were over 250,000 deaths per year as a result from medical errors in hospitals.3 And according to an Office of Inspector General report, 27 percent of hospitalized Medicare patients experienced harm.4 The report detailed the types of harm events with the following: “The most common type of harm event was related to medication (43 percent), such as patients experiencing delirium or other changes in mental status. The remaining events related to patient care (23 percent), such as pressure injuries; to procedures and surgeries (22 percent), such as intraoperative hypotension; and to infections (11 percent), such as hospital-acquired respiratory infections.”4
