Third and fourth from left: Jen Beloff and Christian Dankers of the Department of Quality and Safety accept Leapfrog's 2017 Top Teaching Hospital award. |
Brigham and Women’s Hospital received two honors in recognition of its exceptional care quality and safety. The Leapfrog Group named BWH as a 2017 Top Teaching Hospital, a distinction awarded to academic medical centers that demonstrate the highest quality of care. In addition, BWH received a four-star rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in its Hospital Compare listing.
Leapfrog Top Hospital
The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit watchdog organization that serves as a voice for health care purchasers, presents this prestigious award to the highest-performing hospitals on the Leapfrog Hospital Survey. Leapfrog notes that Top Hospitals have better systems in place to prevent medication errors, higher quality on maternity care and lower infection rates, among other laudable qualities.
Hospitals that are eligible to receive a Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade must have received an A in the most recent round of scoring to be named a Top Hospital. BWH is one of 109 hospitals across the country to achieve the highest-tier score and be named a Top Hospital. Within that group, it is one of 36 academic medical centers to be named a Leapfrog Top Teaching Hospital.
Leapfrog is the nation’s premier advocate of hospital transparency — collecting, analyzing and disseminating hospital data to inform value-based purchasing.
CMS Hospital Compare
Hospital Compare provides patients with information about the quality of care at over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals across the country. CMS determines a hospital's overall rating, from one to five stars, based its performance across 57 quality measures in the categories of mortality, safety of care, readmission, patient experience, effectiveness of care, timeliness of care, efficient use of medical imaging and unplanned hospital visits.
BWH earned a four-star rating for 2017, up from three stars the previous year. In several measures, including safety of care and patient experience, the Brigham outperformed national averages. Learn more about BWH's rating.
Hospital Compare is part of the CMS Hospital Quality Initiative, which uses a variety of tools to help stimulate and support improvements in the quality of care delivered by hospitals. Its goal is to help improve hospitals’ quality of care by distributing objective, easy-to-understand data on hospital performance and quality information for consumers.