The Leapfrog group that attempts to rate hospitals’ quality of care released its latest rankings last week. The Massachusetts ranking (#4 nationally) stayed the same as last year but the percentage of hospitals receiving “A” grades went up from 44.07% to 48.27% of included hospitals. No Massachusetts hospital received lower than a C grade.
Leapfrog is one of many organizations that provide reports and rankings of hospital performance. These organizations use different quality measures, performance data, and methodologies to calculate scores. While quality data reporting is a critical tool to promote performance improvement, different combinations of measures can lead to variation in scores for the same hospital. As a result, individual hospitals may perform well on one report card and poorly in another.