JFK Hospital Bumped Back Up To An A Grade
EDISON, NJ — J.F.K. Medical Center in Edison earned an A rating from health safety grading group Leapfrog after earning a B and a C in the past two rankings. This is the first A grade since the hospital merged with Hackensack Meridian Health in January 2018.
The grade is the first time the hospital received an A since the spring of 2017, whe a merger was announced with Hackensack Meridian Health. It earned a C in fall 2017 during the merger process, and its first post-merger grade was a B in spring 2018.
The hospital earned high marks for their blood and surgical incision infection rates, surgical complication rates, and hand washing.
Despite its A grade, JFK had some weak areas. They were given poor marks in communication with doctors and nurses, and in C. diff and urinary tract infection rates. (You can see the full breakdown here.)
"Errors and infections in hospitals are the third leading cause of death in America, and people deserve to know which of their hospitals are best at preventing them," Leah Binder, president and CEO of Leapfrog, said in a press release.
JFK earned a higher grade than some other Middlesex County hospitals, including Robert Wood Johnson and St. Peters, both in New Brunswick. Raritan Bay Medical Center also earned an A.
Medical errors, accidents, injuries and infections are taken into account by Leapfrog when calculating the grades. The goal of the rankings is to determine a patient's risk of further injury or infection if they visit a certain hospital.
Leapfrog assigns A,B,C,D and F letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the United States. Leapfrog explains that the safety grade includes 27 measures that are taken together to produce a single letter grade representing a hospital's overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.
The group uses performance measures from a variety of sources, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)
The hospital safety grades are released by the nonprofit group twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. The grades released on Tuesday showed that five states — Oregon, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Wisconsin and Idaho — showed significant improvement since the safety grades were first implemented in 2012.
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