News: Leapfrog Group to launch national survey to evaluate safety and quality of surgery centers

The Leapfrog group is launching a national survey to evaluate the safety and quality of up to 5,600 surgery centers that perform millions of outpatient procedures every year, HealthLeaders Media reported.

Currently, Leapfrog issues hospitals an overall letter grade evaluating them on a myriad of problems, including infections, blood clots, and mortalities. Ideally, these scores help patients choose the best possible care in their area, however, their validity has long been called into question.

The new surgery center effort will focus on staffing, surgical outcomes, and patient experience at facilities that are performing increasingly complex procedures and seeing more aging patients, according to HealthLeaders Media. The grades will also cover surgery centers’ closest competitor, hospital outpatient departments.

The new program will start with a survey of 250 surgery centers in 2019 and will expand to include up to 5,600 centers in 2020. At that point, it will publish data on the outcomes of specific procedures, like total knee replacements (which are also a focus area for a number of CMS-related quality measures), across the hospital outpatient departments and surgery centers nationwide.

Editor’s note: To read HealthLeaders Media’s coverage of this story, click here. To read about a lawsuit against Leapfrog over inaccurate patient safety grades, click here. To read how CDI plays a role in publicly reported data, click here.