The five Intermountain Health Colorado hospitals, which include Grand Junction’s St. Mary’s Regional Hospital, recently received an “A” hospital-safety grade from The Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit patient-safety advocate.

The grade recognizes hospitals’ efforts to protect patients and provide safe, high-quality care for the communities they serve. Leapfrog grades hospitals across the country based on more than 30 performance measures such as errors, accidents, injuries and infections, and the systems hospitals have in place to prevent them.

St. Mary’s Hospital Chief Medical Officer Dr. Michele Arnold said those performance measures may be: something as complex as a patient-safety or quality measure, “like a never event or complication that a patient might have” in the hospital; the way its nurses and physicians communicate with patients; or “something as simple as hand hygiene, washing your hands and what we call ‘foam in, foam out’ of our rooms.”

Arnold added, “We actually really excel in our outcomes measures, meaning how we take care of patients. So, for example, the types of things that can happen in a hospital, like complications that happen in and around surgery, we do really well in that space.

“In addition, things like hospital-acquired infections – people have IV lines or catheters in place, and those create routes for infection – and we do really well at preventing those types of infections in our hospital. We also excel at nurse communication and at doctor communication, and we’re really proud of those components, and that helps to drive that ‘A’ score.”

Arnold said St. Mary’s Hospital’s participation in the Leapfrog evaluation is voluntary and is one of many different resources available to the public in order to inform their choice of hospital care.

“Leapfrog itself is not one of those that helps capture market share, per se, or it doesn’t drive hospital reimbursement,” she added. “It’s something that we choose to participate in because it gives us something to continually strive for to demonstrate the good safety and quality of care that we provide for our patients at St. Mary’s. So, it’d be nice if we got, like, some sort of additional reimbursement for this type of work, but we don’t. It’s just the right thing to do.”

St. Mary’s Hospital was owned by SCL Health until SCL Health merged with Intermountain Health in 2022. Arnold said that transition brought a lot of adjustments and changes, such as policy harmonization, sharing of best practices, additional clinical resources available to St. Mary’s, and changes to its electronic medical record.

“We’ve weathered that change and continue to provide the same ‘Grade A’ care that we provided back when St. Mary’s was SCL, so I think that’s something worth celebrating,” Arnold said.

In addition to St. Mary’s Hospital, Intermountain Health’s Colorado hospitals are Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette, Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge, Platte Valley Hospital in Brighton and Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver.

“I am extremely proud of the caregivers in each of our Colorado hospitals who are the ones responsible for these tremendous results,” said Jim Sheets, president of Intermountain Health’s Peaks Region, which includes Colorado. “Without them, we wouldn’t be able to provide the high-quality, safe care that we are recognized for in these ratings.”

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade is the only hospital ratings program focused solely on preventable medical errors, infections and injuries, Intermountain Health said in a news release. The program is peer-reviewed, fully transparent and free to the public.

Grades are updated twice annually, in the fall and spring.

Delta County Memorial Hospital also garnered an “A” grade during the spring 2025 evaluation.

Grand Junction’s Community Hospital did not participate in the Leapfrog evaluation.

A full list of hospitals receiving grades from The Leapfrog Group can be viewed at www.hospitalsafetygrade.org.