New IL Hospital Safety Ratings: 24 Get 'A' Rating, 14 Get 'D' Grade

CHICAGO — Two dozen Illinois hospitals received the top safety rating available in The Leapfrog Group's spring 2024 hospital safety grades unveiled Wednesday by the nonprofit.

The independent hospital research company assigned safety grades ranging from "A" to "F" for 3,000 general hospitals based upon how successful they have been at preventing medical errors, accidents and infections.

In Illinois, the following 24 hospitals, below in alphabetical order, received "A" grades:

• Alton Memorial Hospital in Alton
• Ascension Resurrection Medical Center in Chicago
• Ascension Saint Francis in Evanston (Upgraded from a B grade last fall)
• Ascension Saint Mary-Kankakee (Upgraded from a C)
• Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital
• Endeavor Health Evanston Hospital in Evanston
• Endeavor Health Glenbrook Hospital in Glenview
• Endeavor Health Highland Park Hospital
• Endeavor Health Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights
• Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield
• Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital in Geneva
• Northwestern Medicine Huntley Hospital
• Northwestern Medicine Kishwaukee Hospital in DeKalb
• Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital
• Northwestern Medicine McHenry Hospital in McHenry
• OSF Healthcare Saint James - John W. Albrecht Medical Center in Pontiac (Updated from a C)
• OSF Saint Anthony's Health Center in Alton (Upgraded from C)
• Rush University Medical Center in Chicago
• Saint Elizabeth Medical Center in Ottawa (Upgraded from B)
• Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox
• UChicago Medicine AdventHealth in Bolingbrook
• UChicago Medicine AdventHealth in Hinsdale
• UChicago Medicine AdventHealth in La Grange
• University of Chicago Medical Center in Chicago

Overall, Illinois had:

• 28 hospitals that earned “B” grades;
• 40 hospitals that earned “C” grades;
• 14 hospitals that earned “D” grades; and
• 0 hospitals that earned “F” grades.

The Leapfrog Group, which grades hospitals twice a year, also ranked the 10 states with the highest number of “A” hospitals. Utah tops the list, followed by Virginia, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Alaska, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Maine, respectively.

In Illinois, 22 percent of hospitals had "A" rates — compared to more than 40 percent of hospitals in the top 10 states.

And in the latest safety grades, the proportion of Illinois hospitals with top marks declined 2.8 percentage points, bringing the state down two spots in the rankings to 30th.

For the first time this spring, the watchdog ranked the top 25 metropolitan statistical reporting areas according to the number of “A” hospitals. The top three metro areas are Allentown, Pennsylvania; Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Neither the Chicago nor the St. Louis metro area was within the top 25 in the nation.

Nationwide, hospitals showed improvements over their fall 2023 performance in both reducing hospital-acquired infections and improving patient experiences, the report said.

Hospital-acquired infections and preventable errors kill about 250,000 people a year in the United States, making patient safety problems the nation’s third-leading cause of death, according to a summary of peer-reviewed research published in the global health care journal BMJ.

Hospital-acquired infections soared to levels not seen since 2016 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since that spike, 92 percent of hospitals showed improved performance on at least one of three dangerous infections, the report said.

Central line-associated bloodstream infections were down by 34 percent, and both catheter-associated urinary tract infections and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections decreased by 30 percent.

Despite the improvements, “patient safety remains a crisis-level hazard in health care,” Leapfrog Group president and CEO Leah Binder said in a news release.

“Some hospitals are much better than others at protecting patients from harm, and that’s why we make the Hospital Safety Grade available to the public and why we encourage all hospitals to focus more attention on safety,” Binder said.

Patient experiences have worsened since the pandemic, and while the spring report shows improvement, patients don’t report the same level of confidence they had before the pandemic, according to the report.

Patient experience is measured through the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to publicly report how hospital patients measure the care they received.

The five measures are nurse communication, doctor communication, hospital staff responsiveness, communication about medicines and discharge information.

“Patient experience is very difficult to influence without delivering better care, so these findings are encouraging,” Binder said. “We were also pleased to see the decrease in preventable infections, which cause terrible suffering and sometimes death. When we look at these positive trends, we see lives saved — and that is gratifying.”