Judge orders Leapfrog to remove grades for 5 Florida hospitals

A federal judge ruled March 6 in favor of five Florida hospitals that filed a lawsuit against The Leapfrog Group nearly a year ago, which claimed the organization’s “D” and “F” safety scores unfairly damaged the hospitals’ reputations. 

Leapfrog has faced these allegations in two separate cases — one in 2017 and another in 2019 — but those courts ruled in the patient safety organization’s favor. 

A more recent lawsuit, filed April 30, 2025, alleged Leapfrog penalizes hospitals that do not participate in its national surveys. A Florida judge agreed. 

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks said Leapfrog assigned “arbitrarily low scores for several measures” and changed the weighing on those measures for nonparticipating hospitals, according to court documents. 

Five hospitals in Palm Beach (Fla.) Health Network, which is a division of Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, filed the lawsuit April 30, 2025, after three of the hospitals received an “F” grade and two earned a “D.”

The hospitals “have adequately shown a range of harms, including patient diversion and delay of care, physician concerns, insurer inquiries and declines in patient volume” from these grades, the judge said. 

Mr. Middlebrooks ordered Leapfrog to:

• Stop assigning a safety grade to these five hospitals through a methodology that “assigns assumed or imputed values,” scores nonparticipating hospitals differently than participating hospitals or reduces a hospital’s safety grade for not providing performance data

• Withdraw the safety grades for these five hospitals for fall 2024, spring 2025 and fall 2025

• Send corrective disclosures to all entities that paid to license the three most recent safety grades that the grades “were found to be deceptive and unfair”

In a March 8 statement, Leapfrog President and CEO Leah Binder said the organization disagrees with the court’s decision and plans to appeal. 

“We cannot accept the decision’s main conclusion, that Florida citizens — and all Americans — don’t have a right to hear Leapfrog’s expert perspective on how well these five for-profit, Tenet-owned hospitals care for patients,” the statement said. 

Ms. Binder said Leapfrog will comply with the order to remove the five hospitals’ safety grades from fall 2024, spring 2025 and fall 2025. She added the March 6 ruling undermines “all published ratings and reviews in all industries,” including ratings on Amazon, Experian, Moody’s and Yelp, and violates the First Amendment. 

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