Four LI hospitals get 'A' rating by nonprofit watchdog

Four Long Island hospitals are among 19 statewide to get “A” scores from a nonprofit that focuses on hospital safety, a report released early Tuesday shows.

St. Francis Hospital & Heart Center in Flower Hill, Mather Hospital in Port Jefferson, North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset and NYU Langone Hospital–Long Island in Mineola each got A scores from the Washington, D.C.-based Leapfrog Group. St. Francis is one of only two hospitals statewide to have an unbroken streak of A ratings going back to spring 2018. 

Leapfrog, which bases its twice-a-year ratings on data reported to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and on its own survey, focuses on hospitals’ ability to protect patients from preventable errors, accidents, injuries and infections. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also has a rating system, but it’s based on a much larger number of criteria beyond safety.

Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow, the Island’s only public hospital, has had the most consistently poor safety ratings of any Long Island hospital. Its new D rating is the eighth in a row. NUMC officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Catholic Health, with runs St. Francis, also operates the two other Island hospitals with D ratings, Mercy Hospital in Rockville Centre and Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip.

Dr. Jason Golbin, Catholic Health’s chief medical officer, said when Mercy and Good Samaritan also received Ds in fall 2021, “We did a deep dive, and that led us to areas where we really wanted to focus improvements on.”

That led to better Leapfrog safety scores in some areas, said Golbin, who expects higher grades for the next survey, which will be released in the fall.

In addition to offering letter grades, Leapfrog’s website gives scores for each hospital on criteria including infection control, practices put in place to prevent medical errors, and other safety measures.

Golbin said the six Catholic Health hospitals share best practices to improve safety. For example, St. Francis’ policy of having nurses check on each patient at least every two hours — to make sure pain is controlled, to move the patient if needed to prevent bed sores, and to take other actions — was “exported throughout the organization.”

New Hyde Park-based Northwell Health, with 10 of the 22 Long Island hospitals that were graded, long has been critical of the ratings. Two of the four A hospitals, Mather and North Shore, are Northwell hospitals.

Dr. Peter Silver, Northwell’s chief quality officer, said Friday that one problem is that hospitals get penalized if they don’t fill out Leapfrog’s survey. Only three Long Island Northwell hospitals filled out the latest survey, because of the “huge amount of work” to collect and report data, and because of concerns over whether the survey “truly correlates with the level of quality and safety in hospitals,” he said.

“I think it reflects quality and safety to some degree, but perhaps it’s not a complete picture,” Silver added.

Missy Danforth, Leapfrog’s vice president of health care ratings, said hospitals are not penalized for not filling out the survey. If a hospital does not participate, its grade will be based solely on the publicly released information, she said.

Patricia Kelmar, who works on patient advocacy as the health care campaigns director in the Washington, D.C., office of U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit consumer organization, said Leapfrog’s ratings help patients decide which hospitals take safety most seriously. They’re “developed by esteemed experts,” and its survey “dives a little deeper and goes a little broader” than the federal survey in measuring patient safety. It also presents the federal data on its website in a way consumers can more easily understand, she said.

Kelmar said Leapfrog prods hospitals to improve safety through “the pressure it puts on the C [executive] suite of our hospitals to know they are being compared against their neighbors and how well are they performing against other local facilities. And it gives them a way to see that, 'Yes, it is possible to drive down our infection rate because that hospital over there is doing it.’ ”

Kelmar pointed to New Jersey, where 43.5% of hospitals in the latest Leapfrog survey got A ratings, compared with 12.7% in New York, which has for years had among the lowest percentage of A ratings in the country.

In New Jersey, more hospitals participate in the survey than in New York, and a nonprofit health-quality group gathers those hospitals together every year to share information and practices, she said.

Silver said that, beginning with the next Leapfrog survey, all Northwell hospitals will submit data.

“Even though we have questions about the validity of the survey, the public still reads these, and other health systems are submitting data,” he said. “We want the public to know about the high level of safety in our buildings, about the excellent quality of care that we provide, how confident we are in our hospitals. We want our communities to have that confidence, also.”

By David Olson

david.olson@newsday.com@DavidOlson11

David Olson covers health care. He has worked at Newsday since 2015 and previously covered immigration, multicultural issues and religion at The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.