In an improvement from a year ago, 10 Maryland hospitals received an A grade in hospital safety, according to new fall 2019 ratings released by the Leapfrog Group. The nonprofit group found that of the more than 2,600 hospitals graded in the country, 33 percent earned an A grade, a 1 percent increase from the last round of safety grades, released in Spring 2019. Last year, eight Maryland hospitals earned the top grade.

The Leapfrog Group explains that its rating system is focused entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections. The hospital safety grades are released by the nonprofit group twice a year, in the spring and in the fall.

Maine, Utah, Virginia, Oregon and North Carolina had the highest percentage of hospitals that received an A grade. Three states — Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota — did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

New to the A grades this year in Maryland is UM Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Glen Burnie. “Congratulations to our dedicated staff members for providing outstanding care to our community,” the facility tweeted.

Howard County General Hospital in Columbia, part of Johns Hopkins Medicine, is also new to the A grades this year. “Congratulations to Johns Hopkins Medicine hospitals for earning top safety grades this fall,” the network said on Twitter.

Here are the grades Maryland hospitals were given by the Leapfrog Group:

A grades

B grades

C grades

D grades

No hospitals in Maryland received an F grade.

The release of the fall 2019 safety grades coincides with the 20th anniversary of a published report that revealed nearly 100,000 lives are lost every year because of preventable medical errors.

“In stark contrast to 20 years ago, we’re now able to pinpoint where the problems are, and that allows us to grade hospitals,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a statement. “It also allows us to better track progress. Encouragingly, we are seeing fewer deaths from the preventable errors we monitor in our grading process.”

Leapfrog assigns A,B,C,D and F letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the United States. Leapfrog explains that the safety grade includes performance measures taken from federal government data and the group’s own hospital survey to “produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.” The group relies on a panel of experts to select the measures used in the methodology and to develop a scoring system. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)

To see the story by Deb Belt as it originally appeared on Patch.com, click here.

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