ALBANY – Hospitals in New York State ranked as the nations’ second worst for patient-safety incidents, according to a report released this week.

The state ranked above only New Jersey in the report by HealthGrades, a Denver-based company that studies health care quality.

Overall, patient-safety incidents in U.S. hospitals grew to 1.24 million from 1.18 million, according to the report. The study used safety indicators developed by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and was based on Medicare claims data at nearly 5,000 hospitals in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa ranked as the top states for hospital patient safety. A spokesman for the Healthcare Association of New York State, Bill Van Slyke, said the rankings may be skewed because New York is more aggressive about reporting patient safety-incidents.

“This essentially punishes the state for being better at reporting data,” he said.

The author of the study, Samantha Collier, said while New York does have aggressive reporting requirements, that is probably not the reason for the state’s poor performance. If it were, New York would have performed poorly across all 13 indicators reviewed by the state – not just a few, she said.

In particular, New York hospitals reported high incidences of bed sores and also had the highest rate of “failure to rescue” incidents.

“Failure to rescue” occurs when a patient dies from a complication that was acquired during hospitalization. For example, a patient might enter the hospital for a knee operation, then develop pneumonia. There were 163 “failure to rescue” cases for every 1,000 patients in New York State, compared to 96 for every 1,000 in Minnesota.

Medicare patients in Minnesota had a nearly 30% lower risk of developing one or more patient-safety incidents, compared with the worst state, New Jersey. If all hospitals performed at the level of the top 15%, there would be 280,000 fewer patient safety incidents and 44,000 fewer deaths among Medicare patients, according to the report. St. Peter’s in Albany was the only hospital in New York State to score in the report’s top 15% of hospitals.

The report noted the rankings on patient safety should not be used to determine the quality of care of hospitals. The study noted 25 states have some form of mandatory reporting for patient-safety incidents.

“We certainly take these reports seriously and will review the data to determine if there are areas where the [Health Department] can further strengthen its surveillance initiatives,” a spokesman for the state Health Department, Rob Kenny, said.