The Leapfrog Group is a voluntary, non-profit organization that aims to improve patient safety. It works with employers and hospitals. For more information, please visit the Web site: http://www.leapfroggroup.org/for_consumers

These are the Leapfrog performance measures we use and why they’re important:

Appropriate ICU Staffing: Hospitals with an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) staff it with intensivists.

• Most hospitals have an ICU. ICU care should be given by those with special training in critical care, like doctors called 'intensivists'.
• Research shows a lower death rate in hospitals with intensivists.

Medication Error Prevention: The hospital uses a CPOE system.

• Entering orders for medicine and tests in a computer (CPOE - Computer Physician Order Entry) lowers the chance for errors.
• Hospitals that use CPOE have fewer errors.

Steps to Avoid Harm

• Hospitals do many things to improve safety.
• There are 27 measures to decrease medical mistakes such as labeling x-rays correctly, labeling medicine correctly, and preventing wrong-site surgery.

Managing Serious Errors

• These mistakes are extremely rare medical errors that should never happen to a patient
• Often termed "never events", these include errors such as:
  • Surgery performed on the wrong body part; or on the wrong patient,
  • Leaving a foreign object inside a patient after surgery, or
  • Discharging an infant to the wrong person.
• Never events are indeed quite rare and Leapfrog recognizes that processes sometimes fail and humans do make mistakes. However, The Leapfrog Group wants to give public recognition to hospitals that are willing to take all the right steps in the rare event that a serious reportable adverse event occurs in their facility.