Five Palm Beach, Fla.-based hospitals, Delray Medical Center, Good Samaritan Medical Center, Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, West Boca Medical Center and St. Mary’s Medical Center have filed a legal complaint against The Leapfrog Group.
The complaint, filed April 30 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleges that the organization’s hospital patient safety ratings are “inaccurate, corrupt and misleading,” according to an April 30 news release.
The complaint was filed a day before The Leapfrog Group published its latest round of hospital safety grades. Three of the hospitals that filed the complaint received an “F” grade and two earned a “D.”
Since 2012, Leapfrog has assigned safety grades biannually to nearly 3,000 acute care hospitals in the U.S. The grades are based on an evaluation of how a hospital performs across 22 national patient safety measures from CMS, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and supplemental data. The group operates the only ratings program that exclusively measures hospitals’ ability to prevent patient harm. Read the full methodology here.
The five hospitals claim that the rankings are deceptive, harming hospitals’ reputations and misinforming patients.
The hospitals have tried repeatedly to engage with The Leapfrog Group to address methodology concerns, but the group has denied their attempts, according to the release.
The plaintiffs also claim that Leapfrog is “deliberately failing” hospitals that do not respond to voluntary data requests.
“Patient safety and clinical excellence are at the core of everything we do,” Sheri Montgomery, CEO of Good Samaritan Medical Center, said in the release. “Our hospitals are continuously working to improve the patient experience and have been recognized repeatedly for our leadership in quality, innovation, and compassionate care. We will not allow that record to be smeared by The Leapfrog Group’s reckless, self-serving and fundamentally dishonest ratings system.”
The complaint claims that Leapfrog’s methodology is outdated and uses non-existent data, misleads patients and erodes public trust in hospitals and lacks transparency.
“When we look at these hospitals’ results from CMS, we see preventable suffering and death far exceeding the national average, and even the national average is too high,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of Leapfrog, said in a statement. “These hospitals may wish to withhold their hospitals’ safety grades from the community they serve, but Leapfrog intends to fully defend its expert, proven and long-standing methodology to prevent that from happening and publish grades for all eligible hospitals, including these hospitals.”
“Leapfrog will win in court as we always do. When we look at these hospitals’ results from CMS, we see preventable suffering and death far exceeding the national average and even the national average is too high. Instead of using their resources to file frivolous lawsuits, they should be improving how their patients are treated. That is the leadership communities expect from their hospitals,” Ms. Binder said.
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