A recent report gave Vidant Beaufort Hospital in Washington and Vidant Medical Center in Greenville ‘C’ ratings for hospital safety, but Vidant officials say there is more to the story than a letter.

The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit group devoted to bettering the U.S. health care system, releases hospital safety scores twice a year for hospitals around the country. The research uses 28 different measures to come up with a single score that represents how a hospital is performing when it comes to “keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors,” according to the website, www.hospitalsafetyscore.org.

The website is an attempt by Leapfrog to compile complex government data and convert it into a medium the average person can understand. But despite these efforts, there are still problems with aligning the Leapfrog data with the internal data from Vidant — often due to the different methods of compiling data.

Some of the Leapfrog report’s measures include: surgery safety problems; usage of standard safety procedures; and infection safety problems.

Harvey Case, president of Vidant Beaufort Hospital, said one of the main things to consider is the nonprofit’s use of fairly dated data to compile these scores.

Compared to Leapfrog’s last rating, there are three areas where the hospital appears to have scored worse on the fall 2015 report than in previous reports: patient falls; preventing DVTs or blood clots; and pressure ulcers (bed sores), Case said.

The falls data in the report was taken from June 2011 to July 2013. Vidant Beaufort scored 0.38 in patient falls, meaning the “number of times patients experienced falls for every 1,000 people discharged.”

Vidant keeps its own internal scoring records, and while Case did not offer their data from June 2011 to July 2013, he said the hospital had zero falls in 2014 and two this fiscal year.

“We tend to focus on the trends — are we getting better?” Case said. “That’s really how we do business.”

Both the blood clot data and ulcer data in the Leapfrog report were compiled from July 2012 to June 2014. Case said that from 2013-2015, the hospital’s data shows it had one instance of preventable blood clots each year and no pressure ulcers.

“This isn’t against Leapfrog. It’s just trying to understand their rating,” he said. “We think comparative data is very important.”

The hospital’s overall score was docked for the number of patients with preventable blood clots, but despite this, the hospital still received a seemingly good score.

Case said the use of percentages with small numbers should also be considered. For example, if the hospital goes from one fall to two falls in a year, then that would be considered a 100-percent increase, even though it is still only increasing by one.

“These measures are a little bit tricky. It’s a challenge,” he said. “I think my point is we measure these, and over the past four years, we’ve gotten better every year.”

Case said there has been a big push with Vidant Health to improve medical care by making sure staff is trained in best-practice national standards, whether it’s stroke patient care, treating pneumonia, or most recently, what to do in the event of sepsis, which is when a patient’s body has an inflammatory response to an infection.

“Health care is changing. Everybody is becoming more transparent, which is a good thing,” he said. “Everybody’s getting better due to this, and so are we.”

“We have a team of folks here who are devoted to our safety and quality measures,” said Pam Shadle, manager of marketing and public relations at Vidant Beaufort. “It is continuous improvement, and that patient safety and quality care is paramount in everything we do every day.”

Christine Mackey, communications manager at Vidant Health, said in an email, “To understand the reports that rank hospitals, it is important to determine the differences among the hospitals. Vidant Medical Center (in Greenville) serves a role in eastern NC that is anticipated to have some differences in outcomes when compared to others as a result of the severity of illness among patients, the underlying chronic diseases and the socioeconomic conditions that contribute to the outcomes. Eastern NC is rural with 1.5 million people with a higher incidence of chronic disease.”

She said Vidant Medical Center is one of the largest in the country and has a high number of hospital-to-hospital transfers with about 60 percent of patients coming from outside of the nearest surrounding counties.

“Every day we come to work to get better, and I think if you looked at the data we measure, as well, that’s proven that we get better every year,” Case said. “We’re really proud of what we’ve done and what we’ve accomplished.”

“We believe that we provide great care,” he said. “But sometimes you can do everything right and still have falls. We still try to take responsibility for everything.”

Despite the ‘C’ ratings, Shadle said community hospitals have an advantage in that they receive corporate support but are also able to personally serve the surrounding community.

“In a community hospital setting, I tell people we have the best of both systems. … It’s our friends and neighbors, and it’s our family,” she said. “It’s folks you go to church with, it’s folks you see on the ball field with your kids.”