Leapfrog Group for Patient Safety     

Hospitals: click here for more info on the 2008 Survey

According to the Institute of Medicine, each year between 44,000 and 98,000 people die from preventable medical mistakes made in hospitals. In addition, one million preventable medication mistakes occur annually. The key is that many mistakes are preventable.

The Virginia Business Coalition on Health is the Regional Roll-out Leader for the Leapfrog Group.  The Leapfrog Group was founded by the Fortune 500 Business Roundtable with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is guided by some of the nation’s leading medical and scientific experts. It was created to help save lives and reduce preventable medical mistakes by giving consumers the information they need to make more informed healthcare choices. Key to its mission is promoting a transparent marketplace where hospital and physician quality and value are readily discernable by the public and superior providers are rewarded.  Click Here for more information on the Virginia Regional Roll-out Leader.

Does Quality Reporting Matter?  Yes it does..... "Commitment to Quality and Safety [is] Linked to Higher Patient Satisfaction is US Hospitals"...read more Press_Ganey_-_Leapfrog_release

 

To review Leapfrog data for Virginia, visit www.leapfroggroup.org or Click Here for the latest Virginia-wide VBCH-Leapfrog Hospital Quality and Safety Survey Report Card or Click Here for in The News

The Four Key Questions
The four key questions consumers should be asking when they are making decisions about their hospital care are:

• Does the hospital use a computerized physician order entry system (CPOE system)?
• Does the hospital have a high rate of good results or extensive experience with the specific procedures or diagnoses?
• Is the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) adequately staffed by physicians and other caregivers who are specifically trained in intensive care?
• Does the hospital have a high Leapfrog Quality Index? Thismeans the hospital has put in place up to 27 practices known to reduce preventable medical mistakes. 

There are other very important practices that hospitals implement to ensure patient safety.  However, Leapfrog is focusing initially on these four Leaps because scientific evidence shows that these specific leaps will significantly reduce preventable mistakes and save lives.

NOTE: We can all be better-informed consumers of hospital services.  Consumers should not rely exclusively on The Leapfrog Group's criteria in making health care decisions. They also should consult other sources of information about healthcare quality. These four practices will save lives. Adoption of these practices could save nearly 60,000 lives and prevent more than 500,000 medication errors annually.

Click Here to to view the video The Quality Choir: From Warm-Up to Harmony

The VBCH Regional Roll-out includes the following MSAs:

Blacksburg-Christiansburg-Radford, VA MSA
Charlottesville, VA MSA
Danville, VA MSA
Harrisonburg, VA MSA
Johnson City-Kingsport-Bristol (Tri-Cities), TN-VA CSA
Lynchburg, VA MSA
Richmond, VA MSA
Roanoke, VA MSA
Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC MSA
Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV CSA

VBCH &The Leapfrog Grpup: Meeting the Four Cornerstones

The Leapfrog Group is a voluntary program aimed at mobilizing employer purchasing power to advance America’s health industry toward big leaps in health care safety, quality and customer value. Leapfrog is a national program in which purchasers and health plans can participate and thereby meet all four of the cornerstones.

Cornerstone #1: Interoperable Health Information Technology – Leapfrog’s annual Hospital Quality and Safety Survey assesses hospital practices in the area of patient safety. The patient safety practices have all been identified through rigorous research as resulting in improved quality of care and reduced costs. Among these practices is the use of a breakthrough health information technology – Computer Physician Order Entry (CPOE). With CPOE systems, hospital staff enter medication orders via a computer linked to prescribing error prevention software. CPOE has been shown to reduce serious prescribing errors in hospitals by more than 50%.

Cornerstone #2: Transparency of Quality – Leapfrog advances transparency of quality in two ways. First, results from Leapfrog’s two hospital performance transparency initiatives—the Leapfrog Hospital Quality and Safety Survey and Leapfrog Hospital Insights-- are posted on the Leapfrog web site so that consumers, purchasers, providers and insurers can see how hospitals stand against the Leapfrog-specified quality and safety practices.  Second, the employer purchasers comprising the Leapfrog Health Plan Users’ Group annually communicate their goals to the nation’s five largest commercial insurers regarding provision of provider quality data to health plan members, and then assess each insurer’s performance relative to those goals.

Cornerstone #3: Transparency of Price – Leapfrog also advances transparency of price information and advocates that the information be made available with quality data to the maximum extent possible. The  employer purchasers comprising the Leapfrog Health Plan Users’ Group regularly communicate their goals to the nation’s five largest commercial insurers regarding provision of provider efficiency data to health plan members, and then assess each insurer’s performance relative to those goals.

Cornerstone #4: Incentives for High-Value Health Care - The Leapfrog Hospital Rewards Program™ is a tool for employers and health plans to use to provide incentives and rewards to hospitals that demonstrate excellence or show improvement on important measures of quality and efficiency. The Leapfrog Hospital Rewards Program identifies five conditions that can deliver significant opportunity for increased quality and affordability in the working population: coronary artery bypass graft, angioplasty, heart attack care, community acquired pneumonia and  deliveries/neo-natal care. The Program has designed an actuarially sound mechanism for rewarding hospitals for excellence and improved performance in these important clinical areas.

For more information, visit www.leapfroggroup.org

To read the full report, click here

Click Here for the eValue8-NBCH Cornerstone Report

Click Here for a “toolkit” that includes a letter to CEOs, a statement of support for employer sign-on, and a list of RFI questions that can be used by purchasers to assure cornerstone and health plan compatibility.