Alvarado Awarded for Excellence in Patient Safety!

Alvarado Hospital Medical Center has been recognized by two national quality ratings organizations for excellence in patient safety. The Leapfrog Group’s Spring 2019 awards, announced earlier this month, handed Alvarado Hospital an ‘A’ Hospital Safety Grade. The hospital is also a recipient of the Healthgrades 2019 Patient Safety Excellence Award™. Leapfrog’s ‘A’ rating is in recognition of Alvarado Hospital’s superior efforts and results in providing safe care for its patients. Similarly, the Healthgrades award places Alvarado among the top 5% of all short-term acute care hospitals reporting patient safety data as evaluated by Healthgrades. This marks the fifth consecutive year that Healthgrades has awarded Alvarado Hospital this distinction (2015-2019).

The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit organization committed to improving health care quality and safety for consumers and purchasers, awads "safety grades" to hospitals on an A-F scale, based on their performance in preventing medical errors, injuries, accidents, infections and other harms to the patients in their care.

Developed under the guidance of a national Expert Panel, the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to more than 2,600 U.S. acute-care hospitals twice per year. The Hospital Safety Grade’s methodology is peer-reviewed and fully transparent, and the results are free to the public.

Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award recipient hospitals demonstrate excellent performance in safety provided for patients in the Medicare population, as measured by objective outcomes (risk-adjusted patient safety indicator rates) for 14 patient safety indicators defined by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

“Patient safety is our mantra,” explains Robin Gomez, CEO of Alvarado Hospital. “There are some things that we cannot control in our industry, so we concentrate on things we can, like the quality of care we deliver, and the well-being of the patients we take care of. I’m gratified to see, once again, that our efforts are being lauded by such distinguished organizations such as The Leapfrog Group and Healthgrades. I’m so proud of our hospital!”