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Piedmont Athens Regional Scores High for Patient Safety

Piedmont.org

An Athens hospital is being recognized nationally. Piedmont Athens Regional has received its second consecutive “A” grade for patient safety from the Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit health care ratings organization. Piedmont CEO Michael Burnett has been at the facility since the beginning of May.

“Leapfrog was formed by major corporations years ago to help to tell how hospitals are doing based on multiple clinical indicators,” according to Burnett. “So we’re excited to have that, not only for the second year in a row, but the only teaching hospital in the state of Georgia to receive that as well.”

Piedmont Athens Regional was one of 27 hospitals in Georgia awarded an ‘A’ for its efforts in protecting patients from harm and meeting the highest safety standards. It also was also the only facility in Georgia named a Top Teaching Hospital by Leapfrog last December.

Burnett says an ongoing expansion project at the hospital will help improve services at the hospital.

“We’re in the enabling part of the project, we’re renovating some existing space so we can move some services out of what we call the 1919 building. It was built over a hundred years ago, but once we those services out it will be demolished and then we’ll begin construction on the new tower which should be coming online in the first of 2020.”

The Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade uses 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to approximately 2,600 hospitals in the United States twice per year. It is peer reviewed, fully transparent and free to the public.

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