All BayCare Acute-Care Hospitals Earn Top Score for Patient Safety

The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit organization that promotes patient safety, announced its Fall 2023 Hospital Safety Grades today, and all eligible BayCare acute-care hospitals received an “A,” the group’s highest rating.

The Leapfrog Group collects and analyzes data about infections, accidents, injuries, and errors at nearly 3,000 general hospitals. In the spring and fall, the Leapfrog Group assigns them letter grades ranging from “A” to “F” and releases those grades publicly.

These are the hospitals that earned an “A” from Leapfrog:

• Bartow Regional Medical Center
• Mease Countryside Hospital, Safety Harbor
• Mease Dunedin Hospital
• Morton Plant Hospital, Clearwater
• Morton Plant North Bay Hospital, New Port Richey
• St. Anthony’s Hospital, St. Petersburg
• St. Joseph’s Hospital, Tampa
• St. Joseph’s Hospital-North, Lutz
• St. Joseph’s Hospital-South, Riverview
• South Florida Baptist Hospital, Plant City
• Winter Haven Hospital

BayCare Alliant Hospital, St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital, St. Joseph’s Women’s Hospital and Winter Haven Women’s Hospital are not given safety grades because the Leapfrog Group focuses on general, acute-care hospitals. Additionally, BayCare Hospital Wesley Chapel does not have a grade because it opened in March 2023, so there is not enough data for it to have a grade yet.

“This is a tremendous accomplishment – it is exceedingly rare for all the eligible hospitals within an organization as large as ours to achieve all As,” said Dr. Laura Arline, BayCare’s chief quality officer. "This achievement underscores BayCare’s deep, unwavering commitment to patient safety. Thank you to our extraordinary team members, medical staff and leadership for continuing to put safety first.”

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is a composite score that is comprised of the following:

• More than 30 national performance measures collected and reported publicly by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
• The Leapfrog Hospital Survey
• Information gathered from other supplemental data sources