AdventHealth is first to earn Leapfrog Emerald Award for patient safety, quality and transparency

National health care watchdog The Leapfrog Group has awarded AdventHealth the Emerald Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Health Care System, a first for any health system. The achievement honors AdventHealth’s performance across Leapfrog’s Hospital Safety Grades and Top Hospital award, which is one of the most competitive quality awards a hospital and its team members can receive.

In 2021, more than two dozen AdventHealth hospitals earned an ‘A’ Leapfrog Safety Grade, which uses publicly available data to analyze hospitals’ performance related to preventing medical errors, injuries, accidents, infections and other potential harms to patients in their care. Fourteen of the organization’s hospitals across the country also received the Top Hospital award, a designation with rigorous standards for health care safety and quality met by less than 5% of the nation’s hospitals evaluated by Leapfrog.

“The Emerald Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Health Care System reflects AdventHealth’s remarkable achievements and leadership in patient safety, quality and transparency,” said Leapfrog Group’s President and CEO Leah Binder. “This capstone award is a testament to AdventHealth’s leadership and entire team, and success in perpetuating a culture of patient safety and excellence throughout the system from the top down.”

As a national independent watchdog organization, Leapfrog’s advocacy for transparency in health care includes collecting, analyzing and disseminating data to inform value-based purchasing and improved decision-making. Leapfrog’s Hospital Safety Grades is the only hospital ratings program based exclusively on hospital prevention of medical errors and harm to patients. The grading system is peer-reviewed, fully transparent and publicly available for consumers to review.

“It takes leadership and stellar teamwork on the front lines to achieve exceptional health care outcomes that earn accolades like Leapfrog’s Emerald Award,” said William Scharf, MD, executive clinical director of safety and quality for AdventHealth. “Our local and system leadership recognize Leapfrog’s measurements for safety as a key performance indicator and set the direction, expectations and incentives and remove barriers to ensure our teams are equipped to provide exceptional care. A benefit of our health system’s national footprint is the ability to scale our learnings from high performing teams to share knowledge and provide resources to implement proven processes that support safety.

As part of AdventHealth’s culture, a set of service standards guides how team members interact with their teammates and patients: Keep Me Safe, Love Me, Make It Easy and Own It.

“Earning top marks in health care safety and quality requires talented team members and an infrastructure that is embedded deeply into the organization to empower teams with best practices and accountabilities for high-quality care,” said Jeffrey Kuhlman, MD, chief quality and safety officer for AdventHealth. “Our health system’s commitment to safety starts at the very top with our CEO leading the charge and making significant investments in tools and structures that set up our hospitals to be among the safest in the nation.”

With AdventHealth hospitals making up a tenth of the entire country’s Leapfrog Top Hospitals recognized last year, the Emerald Award reiterates the success of front-line team members’ diligence to keep patients safe every day– even amid the shifts and challenges of a global pandemic.

“This is an accomplishment that is shared by all our team members and specifically those in our clinical roles. It’s their commitment to safety that has resulted in so many of our hospitals earning the ‘A’ grade Leapfrog safety score over the years and put us in this unique position of attaining these results so consistently year after year,” said AdventHealth President and CEO Terry Shaw. “I would also like to thank the Leapfrog Group for their continued advocacy for and support of hospital safety for our communities. Leapfrog is a pioneer in providing consumers with an easy-to-understand measure of safety in hospitals across the country.”