Follow-Up Statement from Leapfrog President and CEO Leah Binder on Tenet Healthcare Hospitals’ Lawsuit to Suppress Poor Safety Grade Performance

May 2, 2025

Yesterday, when The Leapfrog Group announced its Spring 2025 Hospital Safety Grades, five Tenet Healthcare hospitals in the Palm Beach area of Florida sued Leapfrog to try to suppress publication of their grades. The hospitals are:

Patient safety concerns at these hospitals

Leapfrog does not want hospitals to earn poor Safety Grades. However, these hospitals are performing far worse than other hospitals across the country in protecting their patients from preventable errors and accidents. This is critical information for the public they serve.

Using data from CMS, the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, the Hospital Safety Grades reveal many concerns about the safety of patients at these hospitals.

All five hospitals fall well below the national average in patient reports about communication with doctors, nurses and other staff, as well as communication about their medications and discharge. Patient experience surveys, collected through a questionnaire during or after their stay, have closely correlated with patient safety outcomes including actual rates of accidents, errors and injuries.

Delray Medical Center –

Significantly worse than the national average in rates of infection in the blood (CLABSI), surgical site infections after colon surgery and sepsis after surgery.

Good Samaritan Medical Center –

Significantly worse than the national average in rates of infection in the urinary tract (CAUTI), surgical site infections after colon surgery and in falls and injuries.

Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center –

Of all the hospitals in the lawsuit, this hospital performs the worst on measures of harmful events including sepsis after surgery, surgical wounds splitting open, dangerous bed sores and more.

West Boca Medical Center –

Significantly worse than the national average in rates of MRSA, infections in the blood (CLABSI) and surgical site infection after colon surgery.

St. Mary's Medical Center –

Significantly worse than the national average in rates of infections in the urinary tract (CAUTI) and in falls and injuries.

Correcting some factual errors

These hospitals owe it to their patients, their communities and their own workforce to demonstrate candor and accountability. That begins by acknowledging their deficiencies in patient safety, and then by working to improve.

The allegations these hospitals have asserted are demonstratively false.

  1. Hospital Safety Grades are not automatically improved if a hospital participates in the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, nor are Safety Grades automatically lowered if a hospital declines to participate. In spring 2025, 406 hospitals declined to participate in the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and earned Safety Grades superior to those earned by the five Tenet hospitals in the lawsuit.
  2. The Leapfrog Hospital Survey is free for hospitals to complete. Hospitals do not pay for their Safety Grade and all of our ratings and data are free for the public to access.
  3. We have never sold consulting services to hospitals or anyone else on quality improvement.
  4. Hospitals that earn an “A” freely promote that achievement in the media and we support them with tools and guidance at no cost.
  5. Leapfrog offers a variety of opportunities for individual meetings and dialogue, and requests hospital feedback on methodological issues and changes.
  6. Hospitals, researchers and businesses can license Leapfrog data for a fee. This has no influence on ratings, which is demonstrated by the fact that we publicly reveal the data and calculations used in everything we report about facilities. That level of transparency eliminates the potential for bias for, or against, any one hospital.
  7. Hospitals, health plans and other health care industry players are ineligible for governance authority, such as a Board seat, within Leapfrog. Many participate on advisory committees and expert panels, for which we are grateful.
  8. Our methodology is based on:
  • Independent Expertise: Our methodology is developed by the nation’s top patient safety experts at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute and reviewed by an independent  National Expert Panel.
  • Public Data: The majority of the data used to calculate the Safety Grade comes from publicly available Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) data. While hospitals can voluntarily report additional information about their safety annually via the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, their grade ultimately reflects their performance. There is no preferential treatment for hospitals who submit to the Survey—it only gives them more opportunity to tell their safety story.
  • Full Transparency: Our full methodology is publicly available for anyone to review. It is also free to search all graded hospitals on our website and see exactly how they score on every measure on the Safety Grade, as well as how they compare to the national average.

Leapfrog prevails in lawsuits like this

Leapfrog has entirely prevailed in the only two instances where hospitals have attempted to use the courts to suppress our Safety Grades:

  1. In 2018, an Illinois court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Saint Anthony Hospital, citing Leapfrog’s First Amendment rights.
  2. In a 2019 lawsuit in Florida, the Court denied NCH Healthcare System’s request to suppress Leapfrog’s publication of its Safety Grade, after which NCH voluntarily dismissed the case.

Leapfrog will never stop fighting for patients. Over 50,000 lives could be saved every year if all hospitals performed at the level of “A” hospitals. We urge these hospitals to redirect their resources from litigation to what truly matters: making care safer.

The Spring 2025 Hospital Safety Grades are available now, free to the public, at hospitalsafetygrade.org. We believe in accountability, improvement and—above all—the right of every patient to make informed decisions about their care.

 

Leah Binder
President & CEO, The Leapfrog Group

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