What’s a Hospital Safety Score?
Ever wonder where MSNBC, The New York Times and AARP get their information about a hospital’s safety?
They look to The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit, watchdog organization that monitors the quality, safety, and transparency of over 2,500 general and acute care hospitals in the U.S. health system via its subsidiary, Hospital Safety Score (HSS).
In fact, if you go to your browser and type in the words hospital and safety, The Leapfrog Group and Hospital Safety Score will be among the top five results.
How Is It Calculated?
To determine how safe a hospital is for a patient, HSS reviews nationally available and publicly reported data from primary sources, such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), as well as several reputable secondary sources.
The company also offers hospitals the opportunity to participate in a voluntary survey.
All information gathered is then weighted and combined to produce a single score that is published as a consumer-friendly letter grade of A, B, C, D or F.
What’s the Impact of Hospital Safety Scores?
In an age where consumers extensively research everything on the Internet, including hospital choices, a good hospital safety score could mean the difference between your hospital growing and maintaining its good reputation and your hospital losing customers, money and respect.
Even worse, a reputation for insufficient safety measures makes your hospital a target for litigious minded patients.
What Can Be Done About Your Score?
While all hospitals have some measure of checks and balances, it’s always a good idea to get a second opinion.
Hiring an independent safety consultant to review your hospital’s policies and procedures is an important step to take toward safety, and one that bears repeating on a regular basis.
Manage Hospital Meds with Finesse
According to the report, Addressing Medication Errors in Hospitals, prepared for the California HealthCare Foundation, medication errors encompass anything that prevents the right patient from receiving the right drug in the right dose at the right time through the right route of administration. These errors can occur at any point in the process, from prescribing to transcribing, to dispensing to administering.
More and more hospitals are adopting technological solutions to address problems with medication errors and ultimately improve the quality and efficiency of care. Of course, a significant portion of the hospital safety score is based on data management, including whether or not doctors’ orders are entered via computer, whether correct medication information is communicated and how drug stocking and delivery problems are managed.
>> See Intelliguard® RFID Solutions for Critical Inventory
With more than 35 million U.S. hospital admissions annually1 and 75-80% of these visits involving drug therapy2, that’s a lot of opportunity for human error, and yet almost all of these errors are preventable. More importantly, the hospitals that do work to prevent mistakes are saving more lives and getting higher Hospital Safety Scores.
>> Download The Risk of Relying on Human Perfection
Press the Call Button: Automate Your Hospital Pharmacy Medication Management
If your hospital’s pharmacy hasn’t automated medication management yet, now is the time. Not only does an automated approach to medication management make your hospital safer and your safety score higher, it ultimately saves lives, time and money.
>> To learn more about how Intelliguard RFID Solutions can help your hospital pharmacy, schedule a demo!
Sources:
>> ®2015 by Health Forum LLC, an affiliate of the American Hospital Association
>> Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics