South Florida hospitals say patient safety rankings are rigged, and sue nonprofit
Five South Florida hospitals are suing a national watchdog group, accusing it of crafting misleading safety rankings that endanger patients as part of a “brazen pay-to-play scheme.”
Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Delray Medical Center, Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, West Boca Medical Center and St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach are all named in the federal suit against The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit that has analyzed hospital data for more than 20 years.
Leapfrog gives A to F grades to hospitals nationwide twice a year for patient safety.
But the lawsuit, filed April 30 in West Palm Beach federal court, says Leapfrog “pressures hospitals to participate and pay, or else suffer devastating and misleading” public safety grades. The suing hospitals are part of the for-profit Tenet Healthcare company.
Tenet Health also owns ambulatory surgery centers urgent care centers, ambulatory surgery centers and imaging centers across Florida, including Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
The five Tenet hospitals are seeking over $75,000 in damages and want Leapfrog to stop grading them and to remove recent grades from the patient safety report cards. The hospitals are asking the judge to rule that Leapfrog’s grading practices violate a law meant to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive trade practices.
Leapfrog President and CEO Leah Binder has clapped back, saying patients should be concerned that the hospitals are trying to “suppress publication of critical information their patients deserve to know.”
The lawsuit claims that Leapfrog in 2024 “rigged its methodology” to punish hospitals that didn’t provide data for patient safety surveys by giving them failing grades. This caused the Palm Beach County hospitals to receive D’s and F’s for the first time even though they’ve won awards and recognition for medical care, according to the lawsuit. The suit also notes that other hospitals that did provide data to Leapfrog were given high grades, despite having reported safety issues.
Leapfrog’s “deceptive grading practices” have scared away patients “from some of the region’s safest hospitals and toward objectively riskier facilities,” or to hospitals that are further away, according to the lawsuit. Instead of choosing not to grade non-participating hospitals, Leapfrog “will deliberately misrepresent these trusted hospitals as dangerous facilities, undermining the doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers on whom the community depends.”
The lawsuit also points to how Leapfrog earns money from some of the same hospitals it grades, and claims that some of Leapfrog’s highest-rated hospitals are some of Leapfrog’s paying members. Hospitals can pay thousands to advertise their Leapfrog patient safety grade, get a spot on Leapfrog’s advisory committee, or sponsor the nonprofit’s annual meetings and award ceremonies, according to the lawsuit.
Leapfrog disputes hospital grading accusations
Leapfrog says it uses more than 20 factors, including rates of preventable errors, injuries and infections to help patients pick the best hospital near them for care.
Some of the collected data is voluntarily reported by hospitals to Leapfrog, and other data is collected from other sources such as from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Anyone can see a hospital’s current and previous patient safety grades for free on Leapfrog’s website.
“Leapfrog will win in court as we always do. But nobody wins at the bedside, where patients are needlessly at risk for suffering and even death because these hospitals have not done enough to protect them,” Binder said in a statement. “Instead of using their resources to file frivolous lawsuits, they should be improving how their patients are treated.”
The lawsuit comes five years after the Palm Beach County hospitals stopped responding to Leapfrog’s “excessive data requests” during the COVID-19 pandemic and chose to “prioritize their administrative resources toward achieving specialty-specific accreditations and certifications that directly respond to patient needs.”
Leapfrog says it will continue publishing grades for all eligible hospitals, including the five Palm Beach County hospitals.
In the nonprofit’s newly released Spring 2025 report card, all five were given poor grades.
This story was originally published May 1, 2025 at 1:06 PM.
