After a federal judge ordered The Leapfrog Group to remove safety grades it assigned to five Florida hospitals, Leapfrog told Becker’s March 16 it has pulled several grades for U.S. hospitals that have not recently participated in its surveys.
The judge’s March 6 order required Leapfrog to withdraw only a few safety grades — those from fall 2024, spring 2025 and fall 2025 — for the five hospitals part of Palm Beach (Fla.) Health Network, a division of Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare. Leapfrog was also ordered to disclose to all entities that paid to license its fall 2024, spring 2025 and fall 2025 safety grades that the grades “were found to be deceptive and unfair.”
Leapfrog, which said the judge’s decision threatens its First Amendment rights and plans to appeal, has taken the added step of recalling recent safety grades to hospitals that did not participate in its surveys.
“Although the court ruling only applied to five hospitals, Leapfrog does not apply programmatic changes to individual hospitals because the hospital safety grade is a national program. We expect to resume full grading in fall 2026,” Leapfrog said in a March 16 statement. “For over 25 years, the Leapfrog hospital safety grade has driven real, measurable improvements in patient safety and that mission has not changed. Patients deserve to know how safe their hospital is and Leapfrog will never stop fighting for it.”
In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks sided with the five hospitals, saying Leapfrog penalized nonparticipating hospitals with a 2024 change to its methodology of its biannual hospital safety grades.
Palm Beach Health Network filed the lawsuit April 30, 2025, after three of its hospitals received an “F” grade and two earned a “D.” The lawsuit alleged the new methodology gave its hospitals “unfairly low scores for several measures,” as Leapfrog changed the weighting on some measures based on whether a hospital participated in its survey.
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