Virginia health officials talk about limits on hospital liability
As the head of the Virginia Department of Health explained, the Virginia Department of Health faces significant challenges in holding hospitals accountable for patient health and safety.
Scripps News Morning Rush
An independent hospital rating organization has withdrawn its rating of a South Florida health system after a judge ruled that the organization unfairly scored the hospital in its semiannual patient safety report.
The U.S. District Court judge’s order comes after Palm Beach Health Network sued Leapfrog Group, accusing the patient safety group of targeting hospitals that refused to participate in Leapfrog’s biannual report card.
U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks agreed with the hospitals, ruling that Leapfrog’s changes in how some hospitals are scored “have no scientific basis, unfairly penalize nonparticipating hospitals, and misrepresent hospital safety.”
Leapfrog Group complied with a judge’s order to remove scores for five hospitals by March 13th. Those hospitals are Good Samaritan Medical Center, Delray Medical Center, Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, St. Mary’s Medical Center, and West Boca Medical Center.
Leapfrog is one of several sources where patients can see the safety scores of their local hospitals. US News & World Report lists ratings and other information about hospitals and doctors. Other consumer sites like Healthgrades and Yelp collect feedback from patients.
Lisa McGiffert, a patient safety advocate and former director of Consumers Union’s Safe Patient Project, is concerned about how the ruling will affect other patient review groups.
“It could have a chilling effect on a lot of companies that are trying to do some sort of rating,” McGiffert said.
Hospitals point out the damage caused by low ratings
The five hospitals in the Palm Beach Health Network praised the March 6 ruling by the judge who heard the case earlier this year.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Delray Medical Center CEO Heather Havelicak said Leapfrog’s performance damaged the reputation of her hospital, along with other Palm Beach hospitals. The five hospitals in Palm Beach are owned by Tenet Healthcare.
“These results are a huge disservice to our hospital and the Palm Beach Health Network,” Haberikak said.
Leapfrog Group CEO Leah Binder said the judge’s order was “outrageous” and her organization plans to appeal.
“This is absolutely terrible for consumers,” Binder said. “Consumers have a right to know what we know, based on expert opinion, about the safety of the hospitals in which they entrust their lives.”
What were the hospitals fighting over?
Leapfrog assigns letter grades to hospitals each spring and fall after evaluating 22 categories of public and private data. Public data comes from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Private safety and quality data is collected through voluntary surveys sent to hospitals.
The lawsuit focused on Leapfrog’s 2024 changes to the evaluation of research data that are missing from four safety and quality measures.
For the spring 2024 survey, Leapfrog used the average of similar hospitals when calculating scores for hospitals that did not provide survey data. According to the judge’s order, Leapfrog will change such scores to “limited achievement” by fall 2024, effectively lowering the overall scores of hospitals that did not respond to the survey.
Five Palm Beach hospitals have discontinued participation in the Leapfrog study to allocate limited resources to other hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.
All five Palm Beach hospitals received lower grades of D and F following a fall 2024 change in how Leapfrog scores missing categories in survey data. After the scoring change, Del Rey’s grade dropped from a D to an F.
During the trial, Havericak testified that walk-in visits to hospital emergency rooms have decreased by 7% to 8% since 2024. During the same period, the number of patients transported by paramedics increased.
“Such misleading rates, based on data we have not submitted, undermine trust in our community,” Habelikak said. “We have seen a wide variety of patients seek treatment elsewhere as a result of seeing these misleading safety ratings.”
Binder said Leapfrog will not score the roughly 300 non-participating hospitals when it releases its spring 2026 report card. Those hospitals, including five in Palm Beach, will be scored using the new method by fall 2026, Binder said.
What does this mean for consumers?
McGiffert, the patient safety advocate, urged consumers to check multiple sources of information when evaluating hospitals and other health care systems.
CMS, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid, provides a searchable database containing detailed quality scores for more than 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals. CMS assigns hospitals an “overall rating” of up to five stars.
West Boca Medical Center received an overall rating of 2 stars on the CMS 5-Star Rating. CMS rated each of Palm Beach’s other four hospitals one star overall. A spokesperson for the Palm Beach Hospital Network declined to discuss CMS’s assessment.
Unlike Leapfrog, CMS does not widely advertise its scores, so the public may not even be aware of that information, McGiffert said.
McGiffert said consumers who have the choice of which hospital or medical facility to visit should do their homework and not rely on a single rating. She said people should talk to other patients, look for lawsuits and talk to their health care providers about things like nurse staffing and infection control.
“People are still pretty trusting when it comes to health care,” McGiffert said. “You really need to do your homework. If someone says, ‘We’re an A-rated hospital.'” What exactly does that mean? ”
