11/21/2025
Hospital safety ratings: Our clinical teams, physicians, and co-workers at St. Joseph’s/Candler care for your loved ones every day, and they remain deeply committed to the highest standards of patient safety.
There has been some recent media coverage of an organization called Leapfrog that we feel mischaracterizes our hospitals and the effort our co-workers put into patient care.
What many may not realize is that St. Joseph’s/Candler does not participate in the Leapfrog Safety Survey. As a result, their rating is neither complete nor accurate—in fact, it is misleading.
Consider, for example, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), where both St. Joseph’s Hospital and Candler Hospital show data that is no different than the national average. These validated, data-driven scores stand in sharp contrast to Leapfrog’s portrayal, which is based on incomplete information. It is essentially like receiving a grade from a school we never attended. No one from Leapfrog has ever visited St. Joseph’s/Candler to assess how we care for our patients.
We stopped participating in the Leapfrog survey eight years ago for several reasons:
💠 We disagreed with their methodology. A significant portion of their grade is based on self-submitted hospital surveys that lack adequate verification.
💠Their survey requires substantial time, resources, and cost—energy we believe is better invested directly in patient safety initiatives.
💠Participation with Leapfrog did not lead to any measurable improvements in safety at our hospitals.
💠CMS provides a far more rigorous, fair, and reliable assessment of hospital safety than a third-party organization that derives much of its revenue from selling licenses that hospitals must purchase to “promote” their scores.
In the months ahead, we will share more about the extensive steps we take to ensure patient safety. For now, it is important to highlight that St. Joseph’s/Candler has earned Magnet Designation for Nursing Excellence six times—a distinction held by only 25 hospitals worldwide. Magnet recognition includes rigorous review and on-site evaluations, with a major focus on improved patient outcomes and safety. We also maintain numerous accreditations from respected organizations that evaluate the quality of care we provide.
We encourage our community to compare the publicly available data from Leapfrog with the validated measures published by CMS. The difference is significant. Ultimately, we trust that our patients and community will judge us by their own experiences and by our two centuries of unwavering commitment to exceptional care—not by an incomplete grade from an external group whose methodology we do not support.
We stand firmly behind our safety, our quality, and the extraordinary co-workers who serve our patients every day. We are grateful for the continued trust and support of our community.
