Fewer Illinois hospitals earned poor safety grades this year from the nonprofit Leapfrog Group, following a successful court challenge to some of the organization’s ratings.
This year, only one Illinois hospital, Roseland Community Hospital on the city’s South Side, earned an F.
Three Illinois hospitals earned D’s. The only Chicago-area hospital to earn a D was Mount Sinai Hospital on the city’s West Side.
By contrast, 31 Illinois hospitals earned A grades, down slightly from 35 in the fall, the last time the grades were released. As a state, Illinois ranked 21st in the nation for hospital safety, compared with 17th in the fall.
For years, hospitals across the country have closely watched their Leapfrog safety grades, often touting high marks in their advertising to attract more patients, and decrying low grades as the result of a flawed ratings system.
Last year, five Florida hospitals sued Leapfrog over its grading system, alleging that Leapfrog gave unfair grades to hospitals that did not fill out its survey. Leapfrog bases its grades on a number of safety measures, using data from the federal government, the survey it sends to hospitals and other data sources.
Roseland Community Hospital, July 11, 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
A federal judge ruled in the hospitals’ favor in March. In his order, Judge Donald Middlebrooks had harsh words for Leapfrog, saying a 2024 change in Leapfrog’s methodology, “has no scientific basis, unfairly penalizes nonparticipating hospitals, and misrepresents hospital safety.”
The judge ordered Leapfrog to stop grading the five hospitals that had sued. Leapfrog has said it plans to appeal.
At the time of the ruling, Leapfrog called the decision “a threat to patient safety,” in a statement.
“The harm to patients … should have been the focus of any decision aimed at protecting consumers, and we do strongly disagree with this decision,” Kathryn Stewart, director of healthcare ratings at Leapfrog, told the Tribune. “All people have the right to know how their hospitals are performing.”
She noted that the judge ruled against one nuance of Leapfrog’s methodology, not the entire grading system.
But following the ruling, Leapfrog decided for this round of grades not to issue grades to any hospital in the country that did not fill out Leapfrog’s survey because “the safety grade is a national program and we don’t provide programmatic changes at the individual hospital level,” Stewart said.
Nationally, that meant about 450 hospitals were not graded this spring because they didn’t fill out the surveys in 2024 or 2025, Stewart said. In Illinois, that meant that 81 hospitals received grades Wednesday, compared with 108 in the fall.
Roseland earned the state’s only F this year, while four hospitals got F’s in the fall. Roseland CEO Tim Egan disputed the grade in a statement this week, noting the judge’s ruling against Leapfrog.
“Again, Roseland disputes this chamber of commerce pay-to-succeed process,” Egan said. “We do not have the resources to commit to playing Leapfrog’s game and we believe the process is prejudiced toward struggling safety net hospitals.”
Roseland Community Hospital CEO Tim Egan speaks to the media as U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, left, visits the South Side hospital to highlight the threats to safety net hospitals in Illinois from Medicaid cuts on July 11, 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
Illinois also saw the number of its D hospitals drop dramatically, from 14 in the fall to three on Wednesday, including Mount Sinai on the city’s West Side.
“The Mount Sinai Hospital grade reflects a prior period and does not capture the significant progress we’ve made over the past year, including measurable reductions across key safety and quality metrics and improvements in patient communication,” said Sinai Chicago spokesperson Dan Regan in a statement Tuesday.
Since the data used in the current grades were collected, the system has made “key leadership changes focused on safety and quality, have strengthened our daily patient safety huddles and implemented patient safety chats to engage our frontline caregivers,” Regan said, adding that Mount Sinai is confident its scores will improve in the future.
Stewart, with Leapfrog, said that while fewer Illinois hospitals received grades this spring than in past years, about half of those that got A’s received straight A’s for at least five grading rounds.
“While an A safety grade is certainly commendable and great to see, a straight A is really showing they are able to sustain that performance,” Stewart said.
University of Chicago Medical Center is one of 11 hospitals across the country that has earned straight A’s since 2012, according to the hospital.
The hospital has a culture of safety that “is a part of everyday work, everyday expectations and woven into everything that we do,” said Samantha Ruokis, vice president of clinical performance excellence for UChicago Medicine. For example, the hospital’s healthcare workers file nearly 20,000 reports of safety-related or potential safety-related events to the system each year, the vast majority of which didn’t result in any harm, Ruokis said.
“It demonstrates that good culture of safety, that people are speaking up before something happens,” Ruokis said.
Despite the controversy over Leapfrog’s methodology, Ruokis said she still believes the safety grades are useful and relevant.
“I don’t think it takes anything away from the value of the grades,” Ruokis said. She said that while no measurement or rating system is perfect, “I think folks should still continue to trust and rely on this as an overarching system to understand how (hospitals) are performing.”
Other bright spots across the state included Endeavor Health, which saw five of its hospitals receive A’s, with Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital and Endeavor Health Northwest Community Hospital getting B’s.
Five of Advocate Health Care’s hospitals received A’s, as did six Northwestern Medicine hospitals, including Northwestern Memorial Hospital downtown.
UI Health, on the city’s West Side, also brought its grade up to an A, after receiving C’s in previous grading periods.