How good are hospitals across New York? Twice a year, The Leapfrog Group releases safety grades for about 3,000 general acute care hospitals throughout the United States. Recently, the fall 2023 safety grades came out.

The national nonprofit organization has a goal of transparency and improvement when it comes to patient safety in health care. The group ranks hospitals using letter grades A through F.

In New York, the grades were broken down as follows:

• 16 hospitals were ranked A
• 22 hospitals received a B
• 79 hospitals were given a C
• 28 hospitals earned a D grade
• 2 hospitals were given an F

What exactly do those grades mean?

Heather Telford is the chief nursing officer at Kenmore Mercy Hospital in the town of Tonawanda. It’s one of the 16 hospitals graded by The Leapfrog Group that received an A. This is the hospital’s 20th consecutive A grade.

"So it's very important, because when a patient comes to us for services, they should be able to leave without any kind of harm coming to them. It takes everyone focused on the patient in order to prevent harm," said Telford.

Katie Stewart, director of health care ratings at The Leapfrog Group, says the grades, determined by public data and the group’s survey, are based on how well hospitals are preventing errors, injuries and infections.

"It's actually a composite, what we might call composite a letter grade that's based on up to 22 evidence-based measures," Stewart said. "So some part of that is what you reference health care-associated infections happening in the inpatient care space, we could call it. But we are also looking at processes and structures that can be used to prevent errors, injuries and infections."

Things like medication safety, staffing in ICU, patient experience and hospital-acquired conditions are looked at. Stewart says the goal is to help individuals make informed and life-saving decisions about where to seek services.

"When we look at this regionally or statewide, we see huge variation in hospital performance," Stewart said. "And so with the safety grade, we're really showing that consumer choice matters. It's important and also that patients should be able to go to a hospital. They should have that option. So we're making that available to consumers. We're making that available to our purchaser members so that they can help drive change."

Stewart says it’s also driving change among hospitals to improve as well. She says New York is very low in the percentage of A-rated hospitals, which means patients in low-ranking states, such as New York, have fewer options to choose an A-rated hospital.

"That is a concern. And it's a concern statewide, it's a concern nationally. Patients should have a choice to go to a safer performing hospital, whether that be an A hospital or, you know, depending on their location, it might be a B hospital," Stewart said.

"I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of work to be done. I would love to say that what we found here at Kenmore, the collaboration and the excellence that we provide and patient care, I personally would love to see that kind of mixture and that collaboration and every single hospital," Telford said.

Kenmore Mercy is one of 36 hospitals in the country, and the only one in New York, to get an A grade continuously since 2014. However, according to Telford, it doesn’t mean the work is done.

"Accolades are a way of reminding people why they're here and what they're doing. So what's next for us? We're going to continue to to maintain the awards that we have [and] get the better awards we've got. We've got lots of opportunity to keep going and we're going to continue to take care of our patients like we do," Telford said.

Stewart says this is the first time that the grades include post-pandemic data, and the group was able to look at how hospitals are doing now compared to before and during the pandemic. She says during the height of the pandemic, there was a huge spike in infections associated with being in the hospital. Now there are significant declines.

Stewart says what they’re seeing at the national and state level for the second grading period in a row is a worsening inpatient experience.