Snohomish County’s hospitals, minus EvergreenHealth Monroe, got mixed safety grades from a nonprofit that analyzes multiple areas of a hospital’s patient care practices.
These areas include surgery patient outcomes, patients being infected within the hospital, patients experiencing falls and injuries in the hospital, and safe medication administration.
The nonprofit Leapfrog recently released its spring results.
Providence Everett got a “D,” down from a “C” last fall. Swedish Edmonds got a “C.”
Cascade Valley in Arlington got a “D,” a drop from the “A” it got as recently as 2022.
EvergreenHealth Monroe got no grade. It didn’t have enough data available to get a grade, a Leapfrog representative said.
“Small hospitals often do not have enough patient experience surveys returned or admissions to calculate the outcome measures,” the representative said by email.
More than half the nation’s hospitals earned a “B” grade or better in the spring results.
About one in four hospitals in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue region got an “A.”
EvergreenHealth recently touted getting an “A” grade in an announcement to the press and on its website, but that was for its Kirkland hospital. The Monroe hospital is unscored.
Leapfrog analyzes mostly federal data to derive its scores.
The scores are cumulative and also weighted, and consider a hospital’s patient loads for weighing the grades.
Providence Everett, for example, fared poorly this round on post-surgery patients having fatal serious complications after, such as a heart attack, which the care team is responsible for avoiding.
There are also areas where hospitals can get dinged based on the benchmarks of what top-performing hospitals are doing. For example, Cascade Valley’s ICU scored poorly because it doesn’t have many specially trained doctors called intensivists working in its ICU.
Beyond EvergreenHealth’s Kirkland hospital, the next closest hospital that got an “A” this round was Virginia Mason in Seattle.
In one bright spot, nationally, healthcare-associated infections are decreasing. However, so is patient satisfaction.
You can read the data at www.hospitalsafetygrade.org
