The Bradford Regional Medical Center received a “D” on a public safety report card released by the Leapfrog Group, but hospital officials caution the report isn’t comprehensive and has some subjective criteria.

In the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, the hospital scored low on having specially trained doctors care for ICU patients; BRMC received five of 100 points. The hospital also received five of 100 points in using a well-functioning computerized physician medication order entry system. In other words, Leapfrog states that good systems let a doctor know if he or she tries to order a medication that could cause harm, such as prescribing an adult dosage for a child.

But Dennis McCarthy, spokesman from Upper Allegheny Health System, said hospital officials do not feel the “less-than-desired results” are indicators of major quality problems.

“In some areas, just one negative incident or report can skew the results because there are so few cases reported (low denominator). At the same time, there are other quality indicators where our hospitals perform well,” he said.

The hospital scored well with doctors and nurses communicating with patients and on hospital staff responding to patients.

Patients also feel that the hospital has enough qualified nurses. Also, the hospital does a fairly good job with its leadership preventing errors, according to the report.

The hospital also scored well on having a handwashing policy and evaluating how hospital workers follow that policy; how effectively the hospital workers communicated with patients about the help they would need after discharge; and how staff works together to prevent errors.

“Both Bradford Regional Medical Center and Olean General Hospital are proud of their quality and safety efforts,” McCarthy said.

He said that officials from BRMC and OGH believe in public reporting and transparency and are aggressive in their stance on quality improvement.

“Each hospital is pushing the envelope on improving quality and safety and has multiple initiatives with the sole focus of improving quality and safety,” he said. “It is the number one priority at both hospitals and we are making progress in improving quality and safety.”

In addition, the report’s findings revealed that the hospital received 66.67 of 100 points for having processes in place for tracking and reducing risks to patients and educating staff on identifying risks and hazards. The report stated that the hospital earned 73 of 100 points as to how effectively staff communicated with patients about their medications.

Other findings included that 2.21 of every 1,000 people had a surgical wound split open; 9.59 of every 1,000 people experienced serious breathing problems after surgery; and 3.85 people of every 1,000 people experienced dangerous blood clots following surgery.

Also at the hospital, more infections occurred than expected, the report stated. Clostridium difficile is a bacterium that can cause diarrhea, abdominal pain, loss of appetite and fever.

McCarthy cautioned that this isn’t a comprehensive report on the hospital’s operations.

“There is wide variation among the various public report cards,” McCarthy said. “There is no one public report which furnishes comprehensive results based on consistent and current data nor should any report be considered ‘the source’ for consumers on hospital quality and safety.”

In fact, he said that public reports give hospitals with indicators, not judgments, in quality improvement efforts.

The Leapfrog Group grade is based on the total number of points earned in 26 weighted areas where clinical, technical and patient opinion grades are awarded.

The grading also was based on a physician order entry test online, which is an electronic submission of medical orders and information to the electronic medical record.

“Due to technical readiness issues, this testing was not done last year, which significantly impacted scores for both hospitals,” McCarthy said. “Had this testing been completed, both hospitals would have been elevated to a higher letter grade. The testing will be done this year and we fully expect both grades to rebound significantly.”

In the past, the hospital saw “C” grades in the spring of 2017 and fall of 2016.

“Previous Leapfrog reports were based on 100 percent quality-related data analysis,” McCarthy said. “Recent releases removed some of the objective quality data and introduced subjective opinion in the form of patient satisfaction (opinion) results from the Center for Medicare Services (CMS), which is already publicly reported. The criterion for the report keeps changing.”

The report can be viewed at http://www.leapfroggroup.org/data-users/leapfrog-hospital-safety-grade