Only 6 Idaho Hospitals Have a Perfect ‘A’ Safety Grade

Chances are your employer already had the open enrollment period for your 2025 health benefits or you’re in the process of making those elections now.

Depending on what sort of plan your company found for its employees, you may be really hoping that a trip to the hospital is NOT in your near future. 

READ MORE: These Are The 10 Things Most Likely to Kill You in Idaho

But should you find yourself in need of care at one of Idaho’s hospitals, you want it to be one of the best, don’t you? 2024’s second and final set of hospital scores was released a few weeks ago. They’re assigned by The Leapfrog Group for hospitals all over America, including 14 of them in Idaho. Since it’s hard to judge a hospital by its cover, they want to give patients an idea of how the hospital they’re being treated at performs when it comes to patient safety. 

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In order to develop their grading scale, they worked with a panel of medical experts from places like Johns Hopkins University of Nursing, Harvard, Stanford, UC Davis, Vanderbilt and the CDC. Their final grades include factors like: 

• Infections
• Problems with surgery
• Safety problems (falls, blood clots, collapsed lungs, etc.)
• Preventive Measures 
• Training of doctors, nurses and other staff
• Communication 

In the spring, just four Idaho hospitals got an A grade. But in the fall? That number’s risen to six! Here’s a look at the hospitals and medical centers that performed exceptionally well and got a perfect 'A' Safety Grade.

Portneuf Medical Center - Pocatello

St. Joseph Regional Medical Center - Lewiston

St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center - Boise

St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center - Twin Falls 

St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center - Meridian 

St. Luke’s Nampa Medical Center - Nampa

Room For Improvement in Rexburg

There was one of the 14 facilities graded that is probably wishing that they didn’t have to wait for the Spring 2025 grades. Madison Memorial Hospital is the only hospital in Idaho that had a ‘D’ grade. Unfortunately, Leapfrog says that they perform below average when it comes to surgical wounds splitting open or the patient experiencing blood clots or internal bleeding after surgery. Madison Memorial earned the worst score possible when it came to the number of patient falls or injuries. 

Leapfrog assigned them below average scores in categories like handwashing, safe medication administration and the number of doctors specially trained to deal with ICU patients because the hospital declined to report their performance for those measures.