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Adventist Hinsdale Hospital earns an ‘A’ for patient safety
Updated: June 21, 2012 1:31PM
Adventist Hinsdale Hospital earned the highest grade possible — an “A” — from The Leapfrog Group, which released a hospital safety score for every acute care hospital in the country.
Adventist Hinsdale Hospital’s safety score is based on the levels of infections, injuries and medical and medication errors. Calculated under the guidance of a nine-member panel of patient safety experts, the score uses 26 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce a single score representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.
Of the 2,652 hospitals issued a safety score by Leapfrog, 729 earned an A, 680 earned a B, and 1,243 earned a C or below.
The designation comes a year after the hospital implemented a new electronic system — called computerized provider order entry system, or CPOE — designed to drastically reduce medical errors and speed up patient care by eliminating handwritten orders for all inpatients.
The organization also introduced a system for administering medication to patients. That process, called Medication Positive Patient Identification (mPPID), greatly reduces the possibility of a medication or dosing error. With mPPID, nurses use mobile or fixed computers in patient rooms with attached bar code scanners to scan the bar codes on patients’ wristbands, as well as bar codes on individual medication doses ordered by physicians. Once a nurse has successfully logged into a patient’s electronic medical record, and before the medication is administered, the bar code on the patient’s wristband tells the nurse who the patient is and it accesses the patient’s electronic medical records to determine if there is an order for that medication.
For the first time, The Leapfrog Group’s hospital safety score highlights the country’s safest hospitals and sheds a light on the poor performance of other institutions.
