All moms want to give their baby a healthy start. But far too many hospitals are falling short of national quality metrics for things like early elective deliveries, C-sections, and episiotomies. A new report from @TheLeapfrogGroup and @CastlightHealth explores these issues that underscore why a family’s choice of birth hospital is so important. http://bit.ly/2l7ZYJK

Nationally, hospitals’ efforts to reduce their rate of early elective deliveries has been a tremendous success, declining to just 1.9% compared to 17.0% in 2010. The analysis also showed the rate of episiotomies has fallen to 9.6%. While this represents progress from the rate of 13.0% first reported in 2012, this rate is still significantly higher than Leapfrog’s target of 5% or less. The C-section rate of 25.8% is virtually unchanged from the prior year and is still higher than Leapfrog’s target rate of 23.9% or lower.

There has been significant improvement in the rates of early electve deliveries and C-sections in the past year in the Memphis market. Only Saint Francis Bartlett had an early elective delivery rate above 1% (3.3%). All hospitals, except Saint Francis Bartlett, either decreased their C-section rate or kept it constant. The hospital average C-section rate dropped from 28.0% to 24.9%. Click here to get hospital-specific results in Memphis.

“We must remain vigilant and continue to demand public reporting of this information to ensure the safety of mothers and their children, as well as to educate employers, purchasers and women themselves who have a powerful stake in the quality of maternity care,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of @TheLeapfrogGroup addresses that although the rate of early elective deliveries declined to near zero, there is still a lot of work to do to continue to reduce rates of C-section and episiotomies. Learn more about their new report on hospital performance: http://bit.ly/2l7ZYJK