Maybe not perfect, but still worthwhile.
It has been an educational experience to examine the Hospital Safety Scores released last month by the well respected Leapfrog Group. Leapfrog was originally organized by large employers and payers in an effort to insure that the large sums they were shelling out for healthcare were in fact buying something worth paying for. Such efforts have been incorporated into our national health policy.
The results for Louisville were not as good as we would all have liked, and for some hospitals worse than they would like to have to defend. Kentucky as a state ranked in the middle. Twenty per cent of scored Kentucky hospitals received an A, and in this regard as a state we ranked 28th. The American Hospital Association wrote a very critical letter in defense of their members and speculated publicly how it could even be possible that Yale-New Haven Hospital, one of the most famous teaching hospitals in the world, only was awarded a C.
For both academic reasons to explore the robustness of the Safety Scores, and because I too was surprised by some of the results in Kentucky, I undertook to analyze in more detail the individual measurements underlying the composite letter scores. I entered the individual scores for all four Louisville hospitals, as well as two of the several hospitals in Kentucky that received a Safety Score of A: the teaching hospital in Madisonville which I hold in high regard, and the Appalachian Regional Hospital in Harlan which has much been in the news lately because of its legal struggles over Medicaid Managed Care. Because the AHA had made an issue about Yale- New Haven, I included both it and St. Raphael, the other major hospital in New Haven. To provide comparison for UofL, I included the University of Kentucky Hospital. Continue reading “Further Details of Louisville’s Hospital Safety Scores.”