Adventist Hinsdale Hospital Earns ‘A’ for Patient Safety

This is a press release from Adventist Hinsdale Hospital.

Hinsdale – Adventist Hinsdale Hospital earned the highest grade possible – an “A” – from The Leapfrog Group, which last week released a hospital safety score for every acute care hospital in the country.

Adventist Hinsdale Hospital’s safety score is based on the levels of infections, injuries and medical and medication errors. Calculated under the guidance of a nine-member panel of patient safety experts, the score uses 26 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce a single score representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.

Of the 2,652 hospitals issued a safety score by Leapfrog, 729 earned an A, 680 earned a B, and 1,243 earned a C or below.

The designation comes a year after Adventist Hinsdale Hospital implemented a new electronic system – called computerized provider order entry system, or CPOE – designed to drastically reduce medical errors and speed up patient care by eliminating handwritten orders for all inpatients.

The organization also introduced a system for administering medication to patients. That process, called Medication Positive Patient Identification (mPPID), greatly reduces the possibility of a medication or dosing error. With mPPID, nurses use mobile or fixed computers in patient rooms with attached bar code scanners to scan the bar codes on patients’ wristbands, as well as bar codes on individual medication doses ordered by physicians. Once a nurse has successfully logged into a patient’s electronic medical record, and before the medication is administered, the bar code on the patient’s wristband tells the nurse who the patient is and it accesses the patient’s electronic medical records to determine if there is an order for that medication.

“With innovations including CPOE and mPPID, Adventist Hinsdale Hospital stands at the forefront of embracing new medical technology designed to improve patient safety,” said Michael J. Goebel, Adventist Hinsdale Hospital’s chief executive officer. “Safety is our top priority – it’s what patients and their families expect every time they come to our hospital.”

For the first time, The Leapfrog Group’s hospital safety score highlights the country’s safest hospitals and sheds a light on the poor performance of other institutions. Every day in the U.S., more than 400 people die because of a hospital injury, infection, or error.

“It’s our goal to hold hospitals accountable for how safe they are and give patients the information they need and deserve before even entering a hospital,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group. “We congratulate the hospitals that earned an ‘A’ and we look forward to the day when all hospitals in the U.S. will earn the highest scores for putting patient safety first.”  

The Leapfrog Group is an independent, national not-for-profit organization of employer purchasers of health care and the nation’s leading experts on patient safety that administers the Hospital Safety Score. For more information, vist http://hospitalsafetyscore.org/.