LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – The University of Michigan might have scored a victory in football over the weekend, but the safety rankings of hospitals in the entire state of Michigan leaves a lot to be desired with no victory for patients.

From the Spring to the Fall of 2022, Michigan fell from #5 to #19 in their safety rankings with only 32.5% of Michigan hospitals scoring the grade of “A” according to the Leapfrog Group, an independent non-profit organization who collects, analyzes and publishes data on safety and quality in the health care industry.

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This is the 10th year that Leapfrog has published their “safety grade” on hospitals across the United States. The grades are based on records of patient safety to help consumers protect themselves and their families from errors, injuries, accidents and infections.

Half of the grade is about process and structural measures and how often a hospital gives patients recommended treatment for a given medical condition or procedure. It also has to do with the environment that patients receive care i.e. a good computerized system to prevent errors when prescribing medications.

The other half of the grade is about the outcome measures or what happens to a patient while receiving care. This represents things like if dangerous objects are left in patient’s bodies, whether they get an infection and other criteria.

In the Spring of 2022, Michigan hospitals ranked in 5th place out of the states listed. Michigan went from 50.6% of their hospitals getting an “A” grade to only 32.5% of them in the Fall.

Of the 81 Michigan hospitals listed, 25 of them received an “A,” 28 got a “B,” 23 got a “C,” four received no grade (not enough safety data available) and one got a “D” which was Detroit’s DMC Sinai-Grace Hospital.

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Only 30% of the hospitals nationally received an “A” grade and 6% of them received a “D.”

Also nationally, a consistent pattern of better performance was noted by Leapfrog citing that “Over the past decade, hospitals also demonstrated dramatic improvement in adoption of technology and staffing strategies that protect patients from preventable harm and death. That includes a nearly seven-fold increase in the adoption of computerized provider order entry (CPOE), which can reduce medication errors by more than 40%. Hospitals also improved on strategies to improve engagement of the nursing workforce and overall safety culture.”

Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said, ”Never in history have we seen across-the-board improvement in patient safety until this last decade, coinciding with the history of the Hospital Safety Grade. We salute hospitals for this milestone and encourage them to accelerate their hard work saving patient lives. For a long time, the health care community tried to improve safety, but progress stalled. The big difference over this decade is that for the first time, we publicly reported each hospital’s record on patient safety, and that galvanized the kind of change we all hoped for. It’s not enough change, but we are on the right track.”