John Dempsey Hospital, the university hospital, earned a higher grade this year than in past years in the Leapfrog report on hospital safety. John Demspey Hospital is located in Farmington, Connecticut. (Daily Campus/File Photo)
UConn Health’s John Dempsey Hospital received an A-rating from a self-submitted survey completed through the Leapfrog Group.
Leapfrog is among many other metric systems that hospitals will voluntarily submit to to gauge the standing of the services provided by the hospital.
“We also receive scores from Consumer Reports, Healthgrades, and US News & World Report, but we do not send additional data separate from the already publicly reported data,” health information officer for UConn Health Lauren Woods wrote in an email.
“Hospital data is collected from the annual voluntary Leapfrog Hospital Survey, and the public data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey and Health Information Technology Supplement,” according to UConn Today.
To complete the Leapfrog Survey, hospitals fill out nine categories that include: basic hospital info, computerized prescriber order entry (electronically noting patient condition and medications), referrals, maternity care, ICU physician staffing, a safe practice score for procedures, managing serious errors that may have been committed, bar code medication administration (to prevent medication errors by coding all medicines) and resources use for common acute conditions, according to the Leapfrog Group.
John Dempsey scored as a hospital that “fully meets its standards” in most categories, except for those that relate to cesarean sections, high-risk deliveries, high-risk surgeries and injuries acquired while at the hospital.
“Improvements in daily patient care and greater efficiencies in healthcare delivery is always a priority and an evolution,” Woods wrote in an email.
“We care for some of the most high risk moms because the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, that is part of Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, is located in our hospital. We are always looking at ways of managing high risk moms so they can deliver safely, due to those efforts our rate is decreasing.”
Of the 30 hospitals in the state of Connecticut, Bristol Hospital, Stamford Hospital, William Backus Hospital, UConn Health and Windham Hospital are the only hospitals to voluntarily report, according to the Leapfrog Group. As it stands presently, there are no hospitals from Connecticut in Leapfrog’s list of top rated facilities of the 3,500 hospitals they attempt to interact with nationally.
John Dempsey Hospital plans to submit annually to the Leapfrog Survey and will send in their next form by June 30, 2016.
“There are active teams devoted to efforts aimed at preventing these events (hospital acquired injuries),” Woods wrote.
“Also, we review these conditions as part of our performance improvement methodology that is designed to learn from these events and develop future interventions to prevent them from happening.”
In non-emergency related situations, students are encouraged to utilize the services provided by UConn Health.
“Windham Hospital is a 20 minute drive away from the UConn campus, while UConn’s John Dempsey Hospital is at least 40 minutes away,” Woods wrote.
“If a student is in need of emergency care then the closest hospital is the standard place to take a patient.”
Elizabeth Charash is a staff writer for The Daily Campus. She can be reached via email at elizabeth.charash@uconn.edu.
