Pair of local hospitals receive improved marks in latest safety report

Two area hospitals improved their grades on a national report card this spring after receiving Cs last fall for their patient quality care.

Glendale Adventist Medical Center received an A, while Providence St. Joseph got a B based on the 28 categories that nonprofit Leapfrog Group averaged out to determine the grades.

Dignity Health Glendale Memorial Hospital once again was given a C.

The data was pooled from surveys conducted by the American Hospital Assn. and Medicare.

The quick turnaround for Glendale Adventist can be attributed to establishing a 24-hour presence of critical-care specialists, said Kevin Roberts, the hospital’s chief executive.

“A critical-care specialist understands the best practices in treating patients when they are at their sickest,” Roberts said. “They have lots of experience in that.”

He said there were some technological steps forward with electronic medical records, including one advancement that lets doctors see if a medication they want to prescribe would have a negative interaction with another medication.

Treating complications from illnesses and preventing falls also may have raised the score, Roberts said.

“We are very pleased with the final results,” he said.

However, Leapfrog’s findings indicate that Glendale Adventist’s patient fall rate, one of the 28 categories, is higher than the average among surveyed hospitals.

Glendale Adventist had received a C since 2012.

Dignity Health Glendale Memorial’s grade remains unchanged since the last round of scores last fall, but hospital officials tout a series of other achievements, including a Patient Safety Excellence Award that ranks the hospital in the top 10% of 4,500 sites nationwide, said Chief Nurse Executive Liza Abcede.

“We maintain our concern that the Leapfrog Group’s approach oversimplifies the complex task of measuring and improving quality,” she said in a statement. “The [28] measures identified by the Leapfrog Group for improving quality and patient safety may help improve patient safety outcomes, but they are neither the best nor the only indicators of an institution’s quality.”

Other hospital officials have said in the past that Leapfrog relies on reported information that’s several years old.

Leapfrog’s findings show that Dignity Glendale lags in specially trained doctor care for intensive-care patients, but that hospital staff excels in working together to prevent errors.

Providence St. Joseph Medical Center’s grade rose from a C since 2013 to B this spring.

Dr. Nicholas Testa, St. Joseph’s chief executive, said the higher grade obviously means a lot in a public setting, and the improvement is due, in part, to fully crossing over to an electronic, paperless system.

“It makes it safer when you have a computer in place,” he said, adding that issues raised by handwriting are no longer a problem.

Testa said there was also an effort put toward decreasing infection rates.

However, while St. Joseph excelled in categories for treating collapsed lungs, preventing patient falls and preventing deaths from treatable serious complications, it was behind the curve on infections in the blood during intensive-care unit stays, according to Leapfrog’s findings.

USC Verdugo Hills Hospital was not included in the latest round of scores, but the group has indicated in the past that if a hospital doesn’t meet a certain threshold of the 28 categories, it is left out.

A representative from Leapfrog could not be reached for this story.