The report cards are in for local hospitals, “The Leapfrog Group’ gives letter grades, ‘A’ to ‘F’ to hospitals across the state, two hospitals scored the highest grade, while one falls behind.

The Eisenhower Medical Center maintains its ‘A’ letter grade for six years in a row, while JFK Memorial Hospital improves its score to an ‘A’, but Desert Regional Medical Center scored the lowest with a ‘C’ hospital-grade.

The JFK Memorial Hospital and Desert Regional Medical Center are both operated by Tenet Health, but the difference is Desert Regional’s lower score. The Desert Regional Medical Center maintained a ‘C’ grade since last Fall, the last time the hospital received an ‘A’ was in the Spring of 2016.

The data from Leapfrog showed Desert Regional with higher cases of MRSA infections than average, the hospital also scored lower than others in problems with surgeries, such as wounds reopening, deaths from serious treatable complications and blood clots.

In a written statement, Todd Burke the Communications Director for Tenet Health said:

“Every day, we focus on driving improvements in care delivery and patient satisfaction. Our clinical leaders regularly review our hospital’s patient care processes and compares our data to nationally recognized benchmarks and best practices. Nothing is more important to us than offering our patients trusted care in a safe environment. While scoring methods differ by organization, and none provide a complete picture of the care provided to patients, we use this and other publicly available information to continually improve our processes, training and the way we deliver care to our patients.”

The Leapfrog Group uses publicly reported information from the hospitals as well as federal information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to determine the letter grades.

The report graded more than 250 hospitals in California, two of them received an ‘F’ grade, those are Beverly Hospital in Montebello and San Leandro Hospital.

Local Hospitals Graded by Healthcare Watchdog