🩺 Fall 2025 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade: What It Means, How It’s Scored, and How Hospitals Can Take Action

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 The Leapfrog Group has released the Fall 2025 Hospital Safety Grades. Learn how to find your hospital’s rating, how the “Foreign Object Retained After Surgery” measure is calculated, how patients use this data, and how Melzi helps hospitals strengthen surgical safety and reduce retained item risks.

A new season, a new look at hospital safety

The Fall 2025 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is now live as of November 13, 2025, offering patients and healthcare leaders a transparent look at how well hospitals are protecting patients from preventable harm.

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is the nation’s most recognized independent A–F rating that evaluates hospital performance on over 30 national measures of patient safety. It reflects everything from medication errors and infection rates to surgical complications and communication with patients.

This season’s grades include data from hospitals that completed the Leapfrog Hospital Survey by August 31, 2025—making those results part of the official fall update.

Whether you’re a patient, a healthcare provider, or a hospital leader, understanding how these grades are built — and what they mean — is the first step toward safer care.

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1. How to find your hospital’s Leapfrog grade

Anyone can search for their hospital’s safety grade at HospitalSafetyGrade.org.

Simply type in your hospital name, city/state, or zip code, and the tool will show:

  • The hospital’s overall letter grade (A–F)
  • Scores for individual safety measures
  • Comparisons with other hospitals in your area

You can also download full reports, see historical trends, and explore statewide rankings.

For hospitals that regularly report to Leapfrog, the transparency offers both accountability and a valuable benchmarking opportunity — to understand how their safety performance compares with peers across the nation.

2. How the grade is calculated — and why the “Foreign Object Retained” measure matters

Leapfrog uses a peer-reviewed, public methodology that combines multiple data sources:

  • Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) outcome measures

  • Leapfrog Hospital Survey results (for hospitals that participate)

  • National data on infections, surgical complications, and safety practices

Each measure is weighted and aggregated into an overall numerical score, which is then converted into a letter grade from A (best) to F (worst).

The Foreign Object Retained Measure

Among the most serious—and preventable—indicators in the Fall 2025 release is “Foreign Object Retained After Surgery.”

For this grading cycle, Leapfrog used CMS data covering the period July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2024. This measure tracks confirmed incidents in which a surgical tool, sponge, or sharp is unintentionally left inside a patient’s body after a procedure — a “never event” that can cause infection, pain, additional surgeries, or worse.

While hospitals have strict counting and verification protocols, small items such as needles or fragments remain challenging to detect, especially under time pressure or in complex procedures. That’s why this metric carries significant weight: it’s a direct measure of both process reliability and surgical vigilance.

Important context: Leapfrog grades are based on past performance windows. Improvements made after mid-2024 won’t appear until future grading periods, so hospitals should view this as both a progress check and a motivator for continuous improvement.

3. How patients are using Leapfrog data to make decisions

Leapfrog’s Hospital Safety Grade is designed for patients and families, not just policy experts. In surveys, consumers consistently say that safety and reputation are top priorities when selecting a hospital for elective care. Leapfrog’s A–F grades provide a simple, public way to compare hospitals within a city or region.

According to Leapfrog:

  • Patients are more likely to choose hospitals with higher safety grades when given the choice for elective procedures.

  • Hospitals that publicly commit to transparency often see internal culture shifts toward stronger safety practices and reduced adverse events.

  • Even patients without a choice of facility use the data to start conversations with their care team — asking about safety policies, infection control, and counting procedures.

4. How hospitals can improve: addressing retained foreign objects with Melzi technology

Despite strict protocols, retained surgical items (RSIs) remain among the most distressing — and preventable — surgical safety events. Standard methods like manual counts, instrument tracking systems, and intraoperative X-rays help, but they are not foolproof.

Melzi Surgical was founded to address exactly this gap.

Introducing the Melzi Sharps Finder

The Melzi Sharps Finder is an FDA-registered, handheld detection device designed to locate metallic sharps — such as needles or fragments — in seconds during open, laparoscopic, or robotic procedures.

When a miscount or missing sharp is suspected, the device can quickly sweep the surgical field and pinpoint metallic objects with precision. By reducing search time and the need for intraoperative X-ray, teams can avoid prolonged anesthesia, unnecessary radiation, and costly delays.

Why this matters for Leapfrog scores

Reducing retained foreign-object incidents directly impacts the Foreign Object Retained CMS measure that feeds into Leapfrog’s Hospital Safety Grade. Even one event can harm patients, delay discharge, and lower safety scores.

Integrating Melzi’s detection technology into the hospital’s safety protocol can:

  • Reduce time-to-locate when a sharp is lost

  • Lower reliance on intraoperative X-ray, which is often ineffective for small needles

  • Support zero-RSI initiatives and align with Joint Commission and AORN best practices

  • Enhance team confidence and safety culture by closing a critical detection gap

Hospitals that proactively adopt adjunct technologies like Melzi’s often find they not only reduce risk but also strengthen staff morale and patient trust — key factors in long-term safety improvement.

Learn more