Area hospitals strive to give patients the best possible care during and after surgery.

To help consumers facing hospital stays, surgeries and other procedures, The Leapfrog Group, an independent industry organization, has released its spring Hospital Safety Score program results, which grades hospitals on their performance in keeping patients safe from preventable medical errors.Erica Mobley, senior communications director at The Leapfrog Group, said that the safety scores, which began three years ago, are used to help improve safety of patients and the quality of hospitals."Safety should come first for our families when we pick a hospital, because errors and infections are common and deadly," Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a statement."It's important for people to know we're not trying to point fingers and say this is a bad hospital," Mobley said. "We are just trying to educate the public."Collecting the dataLeapfrog collects the data used in the hospital safety scores from three main sources through a voluntary survey completed by the hospital, the American Hospital Association and the most recent information published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and assigns a weighted percentage to the results, which in turn is used to produce a single "A," "B," "C," "D," or "F" score representing a hospital's overall capacity to keep patients safe from preventable harm."Letter grades are discernable to consumers and a good tool to use when making a choice on where to seek hospital care," Mobley said, adding that the program is replicated from the restaurant grading programs available in large cities such as New York City and Los Angeles.For the spring results, the data included information from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2012, and April 1, 2012, to March 31, 2013 from CMS; and from Jan. 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013, for the Leapfrog hospital survey.Results and scoringThere are 28 measures used to determine a hospital's score. These include data entry; safety practices; staff hygiene; patient care; surgery procedures such as forgetting to remove a foreign object during surgery; air embolism; and post-surgery procedures, such as collapsed lung due to medical treatment, wounds splitting open after surgery, accidental cuts, urinary catheter removal in a timely manner and proper antibiotics administered.Mobley said that these measures are broken down into two main categories: the process and structural side for policy and procedures in place to prevent errors, and the outcome side on how frequently they occur.The data collected is then reviewed by an expert panel and assigned a score based on the total value of the measure, a measured weighted percentage score and a Z score.Mobley said that the Z score is a statistical way to help calculate performance of the hospitals by effectively making them comparable. If this score wasn't assigned, some hospitals could not be compared because of different procedures available, size and data collected.Positive Z scores represent performance that is above the average hospital performance, while a negative Z score is performing worse than the average hospital.For example, Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest has positive Z scores in 24 of the 28 measures.In some cases, like the reports from Gnaden Huetten, Pocono Medical Center and Palmerton hospitals, consumers will see "not available" in some measures.Mobley said that this could mean either the hospital chose not to complete the voluntary survey to provide additional data or does not have that measure at the hospital.Once each hospital measure is scored and weighted, The Leapfrog Group uses an algorithm to determine the hospital's numerical score and letter grade.Moving forwardMobley said that the next round of data collection will take place on Aug. 31.At that time, Leapfrog will pull all public data published by CMS or submitted to Leapfrog to calculate the fall scores, which will be published in October.In addition, the voluntary survey results must be in by June 30 to be included with the other data collected.Following the calculation of scores, Leapfrog will hold a three-week data review period for hospitals before the release of all scores.According to the Hospital Safety Score website, this period "is an opportunity for hospitals to review the data used to calculate the score for accuracy (i.e. identify recording errors, hospital name and address changes, etc.) and review changes to the scoring algorithm. In addition, hospitals will be able to preview their letter grades 48 hours prior to public release."For more information on the hospital safety scores or to find a hospital's grade, visit

www.hospitalsafetyscore.org.