Kaiser’s Hawaii Hospital Rated Among the Safest

Kaiser Permanente's Moanalua Medical Center. Photo courtesy of Kaiser.

By Sonia Isotov

Kaiser Permanente’s Moanaloa Medical Center on Oahu scored an “A” in a new national report card issued Wednesday by the Leapfrog Group.

The Leapfrog Group is an employer-backed nonprofit group focused on health care quality. It said it issued these first-ever scores to “highlight the country’s best hospitals and warn against the worst.”

Nearly all Kaiser Permanente hospitals have been given an A rating for patient safety — and none lower than a B. Twenty-four of the 27 Kaiser Permanente California hospitals that were included in the report received an A grade. Kaiser Permanente hospitals in Oregon (Sunnyside Medical Center) and Hawaii (Moanalua Medical Center) also received A grades.

A rating for Maui Memorial Medical Center was not available.

While Kaiser Permanente hospitals were rated among the safest in the country, hospitals nationwide fared far worse. Of the more than 2,600 hospitals that were graded in the report, nearly half (47%) received a C grade or lower. In California, it was a similar story. Of the 264 hospitals in California that were rated, 109 (or 41%) received a C grade or lower.

The complete list of Leapfrog Hospital Safety Score results can be found at www.hospitalsafetyscore.org.

“The Hospital Safety Score exclusively measures safety — meaning errors, accidents and infections,” said Ashish Jha,, MD, in a written statement. Jha  is a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a member of Leapfrog’s expert panel that created the rating system for the hospitals.

The Leapfrog Group rated 2,652 hospitals across the country, assigning a letter grade of A, B, C or “score pending” (which means the grade would have been less than C) to each hospital based on 26 publicly reported national measures.