Latest Leapfrog Safety Grades Highlight Top Performing Hospitals

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By Jay Kumar

Hospitals are improving their performance in terms of preventing patient harm, according to the Spring 2025 Hospital Safety Grade released last week by The Leapfrog Group, an independent national nonprofit focused on patient safety.

The biannual Safety Grade is an “A,” “B,” “C,” “D” or “F” assigned to all general hospitals in the United States based on their ability to protect patients from medical errors, accidents, injuries, and infections. These largely preventable problems harm one in four hospital inpatients and cause as many as 250,000 deaths each year.

“For the first time, we have spotlighted 346 hospitals nationwide that not only earned an A this round, but they’ve also sustained that grade for five or more grading rounds and we’ve designated them straight-A hospitals,” says Katie Stewart, Leapfrog’s Director of Health Care Ratings. “It’s about 12% of all eligible hospitals, which we’ve now highlighted and made available to patients and their families on our website.”

Leapfrog has also focused on hospitals that have been able to sustain that level of excellence, she notes.

“Achieving an A is a great a great thing, but it’s really impressive to just see that 12% of hospitals are not only earning an A, but sustaining that,” Stewart says. “That really takes consistency, and those hospitals need to have strong systems in place to ensure that you know their patients are protected.”

Among the Straight A hospitals Leapfrog is highlighting are an elite group of 11 hospitals that earned As for all 27 grading rounds, a total of 13 years. The all-time Straight A hospitals are Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital (Illinois), French Hospital Medical Center (California), Inova Loudoun Hospital (Virginia), Kaiser Permanente Orange County-Anaheim Medical Center (California), Mayo Clinic-Phoenix (Arizona), Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital (Illinois), Saint Anne’s Hospital (Massachusetts), Sentara CarePlex Hospital (Virginia), Sentara Leigh Hospital (Virginia), University of Chicago Medical Center (Illinois) and Virginia Mason Medical Center (Washington).

Preventable conditions

The latest results also found that hospitals have improved their performance in reducing the number of preventable conditions.

“We continue to see that healthcare-associated infections are decreasing since they were at their all-time high at during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically for MRSA, CAUTI, and CLABSI,” Stewart says. “So we continue to see a reduction in those healthcare-associated infections, actually performing better on those than we saw before the pandemic, even in some cases. And also continued progress on improvement with the five patient experience measures we include. We’re not quite back to pre-pandemic performance for those measures, but we are seeing some encouraging improvement.”

State trends

For the first time, Leapfrog is sharing state-by-state data on the percentage of hospitals that have earned Straight As for two years or more. Key trends include:

  • The top five states with the highest share of Straight A hospitals since spring 2023 are Utah (29%), Connecticut (29%), New Jersey (27%), Rhode Island (22%), and Virginia (20%).
  • States with no Straight A hospitals are Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Washington, D.C.

Every grading round, Leapfrog ranks states based on the percentage of hospitals that earned an A in the current Safety Grade. Findings from the spring 2025 state rankings include:

  • States with the highest percentage of A Grades for spring 2025 are Utah, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, South Carolina, and Virginia.
  • Utah ranks #1 for the fourth consecutive Safety Grade round, and ties for #1 among states with the highest percentage of Straight A hospitals.
  • Washington, D.C. ranks #11 for percentage of A hospitals for spring 2025, marking a significant improvement after years of ranking lowest among states.
  • There are no A hospitals in Iowa, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.

“It was really encouraging to see that Washington, D.C., where Leapfrog’s headquartered, has made huge strides in the rankings in terms of we look at the percentage of A grades by state,” Stewart says. “D.C. is not a state, but we include them and D.C. ranks #11 this spring, after years of being at the very bottom. So that is really encouraging.”

When it comes to consistent excellence, Utah has been the top-performing state, according to Leapfrog.
“It’s also exciting to see that Utah has remained number one in terms of the percentage of As for the fourth consecutive round,” adds Stewart. “So again, we’re talking about consistency and performance.”
As for the hospitals that didn’t earn an A, the Safety Grade can be used as motivation to improve their processes.

“We would encourage those hospitals that aren’t earning an A or have lower grades to really look at their safety grade and see where they can make improvements,” Stewart notes. “Leapfrog isn’t in the business of providing those services in terms of consulting on quality improvement. What we’re really focused on is transparency, making this information available to consumers and in turn encouraging quality improvement by making it available to those patients and to those hospitals, of course. So we’d encourage those facilities to really dig deep and start the journey of making improvements. What we’ve seen is that it doesn’t take a lot of resources, but it does require a very strong commitment from leadership to commit to that patient safety and to improve.”

See full state rankings for spring 2025 at www.hospitalsafetygrade.org.