Performance Measures

Dana-Farber tracks a variety of performance measures to assess patient safety and quality of care, including our performance on Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goals and various internal metrics.

The Leapfrog Group

The Leapfrog Group is a consortium of Fortune 500 companies working to leverage improvements in health care quality and patient safety. Since 2004, the group has surveyed U.S. hospitals on their performance in four areas:

• adoption of computer physician order entry (CPOE) systems;
• use of referral hospitals that provide certain high-risk surgeries and treatments;
• round-the-clock staffing of intensive care units with doctors and nurses trained in critical care medicine; and
• implementation of additional practices that can reduce the number of preventable medical errors.

In 2008, the Leapfrog Group began asking hospitals to report outcomes related to heart attacks and pneumonia, as well as the incidence of hospital-acquired infections and injuries.

Dana-Farber supports the Leapfrog Group's efforts to promote safe health care, and is pleased to participate in the Leapfrog safety survey. The survey encourages transparency in health care by providing consumers with information about safety practices at U.S. hospitals.

As a specialty hospital focusing exclusively on cancer treatment and research, some items in the survey do not apply to our organization. For example, Dana-Farber neither operates an intensive care unit, nor performs the high-risk surgeries. In completing the survey, we applied materials provided by the Leapfrog Group (and the National Quality Forum) to assess, as best we could, our own safety practices. While we have exceeded Leapfrog standards in many areas, we also identified several opportunities to advance our ongoing efforts in teamwork training, communication and feedback, and anticoagulation monitoring through this process.

For more information on Dana-Farber's Leapfrog survey self-assessment, please contact Andrew Velasquez at andrew_velasquez@dfci.harvard.edu, or at 617-582-8995.

See Dana-Farber's patient safety ratings on the Leapfrog Group Web site.