CTMC Maintains ‘A’ Grade For Patient Safety

CTMC is the only local hospital to maintain top ranking

In a national announcement made recently, Central Texas Medical Center (CTMC) in San Marcos earned another “A” grade for patient safety. With this latest recognition, CTMC is the only two-time consecutive recipient of the top grade for hospitals between San Antonio and Austin. This ranking comes from the Leapfrog Group, an independent national hospital watchdog organization.

“Ensuring our patient’s safety while they are in our care is the job of every single person that works at Central Texas Medical Center,” said Anthony Stahl, president and CEO at CTMC. “We’re gratified to be recognized once again with the highest Hospital Safety Score by the Leapfrog Group’s elite program.”

The Leapfrog Group’s annual Hospital Safety Score ranks facilities with A, B, C, D, and F grades, rating them on errors, injuries, accidents and infections. Leapfrog releases safety score updates twice a year, and CTMC also earned an A grade in October. The spring scores include new factors, including patient satisfaction outcomes like nurse communication, doctor communication about discharge and infection measures for Clostridium difficile and methicillin resistant Staphlococcus aureus.

The Leapfrog Group’s Hospital Safety Score Program is widely considered the nation’s gold standard rating system for patient safety and is compiled under the guidance of the country’s leading patient safety experts. It is the first and only hospital safety rating to be peer-reviewed in the Journal of Patient Safety and is free to the public and designed to give consumers information they can use to protect themselves and their families when facing a hospital stay.

“Avoidable deaths in hospitals should be the number one concern of our health care leaders. Hospitals that earn an ‘A’ from Leapfrog are leaders in saving lives, and we commend them and urge their continued vigilance,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group.

Developed under the guidance of Leapfrog’s Blue Ribbon Expert Panel, the Hospital Safety Score uses 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce a letter grade representing a hospital’s overall capacity to keep patients safe from preventable harm. More than 2,571 U.S. general hospitals were assigned scores in spring 2016, with 798 hospitals receiving an A grade. The Hospital Safety Score is fully transparent, offering a full analysis of the data and methodology used in determining grades on the Hospitalsafetyscore.org website.

For more information about Central Texas Medical Center and the services it offers, visit ctmc.org.