[Date]
[Prefix] [First] [Last]
Chief Executive Officer
[Facility Name]
[Street Address]
[City, State, ZIP]
Dear [CEO Name]:
I am writing to ask you to support [Lead organization(s) name] efforts to promote health care quality and patient safety. As part of those efforts, we have joined The Leapfrog
Group. The Leapfrog Group was launched in November 2000 by the Business
Roundtable in response to the Institute of Medicine’s startling report on medical errors.
The Leapfrog Group is striving to make giant leaps forward in health care quality and patient safety and now includes 155 public and private healthcare purchasers. We have all agreed to employ purchasing principles to promote health care quality and patient safety, including rewarding hospitals for advances in patient safety and educating our employees about their efforts.
We have added the NQF Safe Practices to our three initial recommended hospital quality and safety practices this year. The NQF Safe Practices Leap provides hospitals with an opportunity to showcase a broader range of quality improvements and enables
Leapfrog to provide additional information to consumers. The NQF Safe Practices Leap measures implementation of hospital processes for improving quality and safety; while responding to the survey requires some time commitment, it is unlike other efforts to measure safety and quality performance measures in that it does not require case auditing or extensive on-going data submission. The Safe Practices Leap will also extend the coverage of the survey to rural hospitals and the survey results will continue to provide the information needed to compare provider performance and to identify hospitals for recognition and rewards.

The Leapfrog standards are:

Use of computerized prescription systems (computer physician order entry)

Selecting hospitals with the best results or extensive experience for select highrisk conditions and procedures (evidence-based hospital referral)

Staffing Intensive Care Units with trained specialists (ICU Physician Staffing)

27 Safe Practices for Better Healthcare (NQF Safe Practices Leap)
Our research indicates that Leapfrog’s standards for the first three practices could save around 65,300 lives and prevent between 567,000 and 900,000 medication errors each year. I have enclosed background information on each of the four practices [enclose
Fact Sheets for each standard] and detailed information about The Leapfrog recommended health care quality and safety practices is available at www.leapfroggroup.org
.
The Leapfrog Group has designated [insert geographic area covered by region] as one of its areas of concentration. [Lead organizations(s) name] are leading efforts among employers in [region] to encourage hospitals to meet the standards for the four quality and safety leaps. We hope that purchaser efforts here will become part of a communitywide collaboration to improve health care quality, serving as a model for the rest of the country. You are critical partners in this effort.
We are asking all area hospitals to take the following steps this year in promoting
Leapfrog’s health care quality and safety initiative:
1. Identify a senior level executive to serve as a contact point with [Lead organization name] on hospital plans to implement the quality and safety practices. We would appreciate it if you could provide us with the contact person’s name at [Insert hospital name] by [insert date].
2. Complete your hospital’s survey by posting responses on the Leapfrog Group’s hospital survey Web site at https://leapfrog.medstat.com. This will allow all Leapfrog purchasers to credit [hospital name] for the health care quality and safety practices

for which it meets Leapfrog’s standards. We request that you complete and submit your survey by [insert date].
3. Provide us with an implementation plan that discusses [hospital’s name] efforts to meet the standards for the four areas of quality improvement Leapfrog is promoting.
The plan should include a timetable for implementation at [hospital name], the names of the [hospital name] managers responsible for implementing each practice and the budgeted amounts reserved for implementing the practices. We are requesting that hospitals provide us with their plan by [set date].
The hospital quality and safety survey will take approximately three hours to complete on-line when the hospital has gathered all of the pertinent information. We have enclosed the security code you will need for completing the survey. Some questions will require gathering information for which you may want to seek key staff members’ involvement. You will find a printable copy of the survey along with background about
Leapfrog’s quality and safety practices and the survey process at leapfrog.medstat.com.
The Leapfrog Group makes survey responses from all hospitals publicly available on its consumer Web site http://www.leapfroggroup.org/consumer_intro.htm
. We also share the results with our employees, retirees, and their dependents. For those hospitals that choose not to respond to the survey, the consumer site indicates that your hospital did not submit a response.
Please direct your questions about completing the survey to the survey help line at (734)
913-3030. If you have any questions about The Leapfrog Group or our involvement with health care quality efforts, please feel free to call me at [Lead name tel#].
I know that you value the health of your patients just as we do that of our employees.
Thank you for completing this survey and taking the first steps in supporting the [lead organizations(s) name] health care quality and safety initiative.
Sincerely,