Multiple St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN) hospitals have been named to the Top Hospital list announced today by Leapfrog Group, an independent nonprofit hospital safety watchdog.

Of the 12 hospitals in Pennsylvania to earn the prestigious Top Hospital designation from Leapfrog, five are St. Luke’s facilities, the only local hospitals to earn the distinction. St. Luke’s Warren (NJ) Campus was one of only seven New Jersey hospitals to make the list. Only 156 hospitals nationwide made the list.

The honors include:

• St. Luke’s Hospital – Allentown Campus, Teaching Top Hospital
• St. Luke’s Hospital – Easton Campus, Teaching Top Hospital
• St. Luke’s Monroe Campus, Rural Top Hospital
• St. Luke’s Sacred Heart Campus, Teaching Top Hospital
• St. Luke’s University Hospital – Bethlehem Campus, Teaching Top Hospital
• St. Luke’s Warren Campus, Teaching Top Hospital

 

Leapfrog’s Top Hospital award recognizes the highest performing hospitals in the United States in the Teaching, General, Rural and Children’s categories. It is based on objective data across many areas of hospital care, including infection rates and the hospital’s capacity to prevent medication errors.

More than 2,100 hospitals were considered for the award. A total of 156 Top Hospitals were selected, including, 15 Top Children’s, 52 Top General, 16 Top Rural and 73 Top Teaching.

“These prestigious recognitions are a credit to St. Luke’s outstanding leadership, providers, nurses and other hospital staff and volunteers,” said St. Luke’s Chief Quality Officer Donna Sabol. “Working together as a team, we have designed and implemented a standardized approach to quality and safety that ensures our entire region enjoys local access to St. Luke’s world-class health care.”

Additionally, last month Leapfrog released its fall Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades, awarding high marks to every St. Luke’s University Health Network hospital eligible for evaluation.

For the Leapfrog Top Hospital award, data is gathered and publicly reported through the Leapfrog Hospital Survey. The survey compares hospitals’ performance on national standards of patient safety, quality, efficiency and management structures that prevent errors, providing the most comprehensive picture of how patients fare at individual institutions. The data collected also enables hospitals to benchmark their progress toward Leapfrog’s standards and measure the care they deliver.

“This year marks Leapfrog’s 25th anniversary – and the 25th year of the Leapfrog Hospital Survey – making it especially meaningful to recognize our 2025 Top Hospitals and Top ASCs,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group. “These honorees are a testament to the extraordinary dedication of these facilities’ entire teams, boards, clinicians, administrators, staff and community volunteers. You don’t achieve results like this without everyone putting their heart into patient care.”

The full list of institutions honored as 2025 Top Hospitals is available at https://www.leapfroggroup.org/ratings-reports/top-hospitals.

 

About St. Luke’s

Founded in 1872, St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN) is a fully integrated, regional, non-profit network with annual net revenue of more than $4.5 billion. With 23,000+ employees at 16 hospital campuses and 350+ outpatient sites, it is the Lehigh Valley’s biggest employer.

The Network’s service area includes 11 counties in two states: Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Montgomery, Monroe, Schuylkill and Luzerne counties in Pennsylvania and Warren and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey. St. Luke’s hospitals operate the largest network of trauma centers in Pennsylvania, with the Bethlehem Campus being home to St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital.

Dedicated to advancing medical education, St. Luke’s is the preeminent teaching hospital in central-eastern Pennsylvania. In partnership with Temple University, the Network established the Lehigh Valley’s first and only four-year medical school. It also operates the nation’s oldest continuously operated School of Nursing, established in 1884, and 60+ fully accredited graduate medical educational programs with 530+ residents and fellows.

In 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recognized St. Luke’s ahead of nationally renowned Mayo Clinic and Houston Methodist as the nation’s three highest performing health systems for quality, safety and patient experience – affirming St. Luke’s status as a leader among the largest and best-known health care providers in the country.

St. Luke’s has been named a Leapfrog Group and Healthgrades Top Hospital and a Newsweek World’s Best Hospital. It is the only Lehigh Valley-based health care system to earn Medicare’s five-star ratings (the highest) for quality, efficiency and patient satisfaction. In 2025, the Network earned straight A’s from Leapfrog across all of its acute care hospitals. It has earned 100 Top Hospital designations from Premier 11 years in a row, including in 2021 when its flagship University Hospital was identified as THE #1 TEACHING HOSPITAL IN THE COUNTRY. Utilizing the Epic electronic medical record (EMR) system for both inpatient and outpatient services, the Network is a multi-year recipient of the Most Wired award recognizing the breadth of SLUHN’s information technology applications such as telehealth, online scheduling and online pricing information.

Information provided to TVL by:
Sam Kennedy