Patients use Hospital Compare to find hospitals and compare the quality of their care.Įxecutive Director of Patient Safety, Quality, Risk, Infection Control, CDI and Clinical Compliance Christi Clark Barney, MSN, RN, says she’s thrilled with BWFH’s rating. Two years later, though, reviewers found that only 2 percent of central-line infections were not reported.Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital recently earned a five-star rating from Hospital Compare, which was created through the efforts of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, to inform consumers about the quality of care at over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals across the country. Central lines are inserted into a patient's vein to deliver nutrients, fluids or medicine. In Colorado, one-third of the central-line infections that state reviewers found in 2012 were not reported to the state by hospitals, as required. Questions about truth in reporting hospital infections have percolated for years, as reports have trickled out from states that double-check data. as feasible, based on operational capabilities." The new IG report recommends that Medicare "make better use of analytics to ensure the integrity of hospital-reported quality data."Ī response letter from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma says Medicare concurs with the finding and will "continue to evaluate the use of better analytics. Medicare did not specify which six hospitals failed the data review, but it did identify dozens of hospitals that received a pay reduction based on their reports on the quality of care. Those hospitals were subject to a 0.6 percent reduction in their Medicare payments. Shots - Health News Medicare Penalizes Hospitals In Crackdown On Antibiotic-Resistant InfectionsĪll told, only six hospitals failed the review, which included a look at patients' medical records and tissue sample analyses. "We require auditing of financial data, but we don't require auditing of quality data, and what that implies is that dollars are more important than deaths." "There are greater requirements for what a company says about a washing machine's performance than there is for a hospital on quality of care, and this needs to change," Pronovost said. Peter Pronovost, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Yet there are no uniform standards for reviewing the data that hospitals report to Medicare, says Dr. "It's a bit much to expect that if they have a bad record, they're going to fess up to it." "There's a certain amount of blind faith that the hospitals are going to tell the truth," McGiffert says. Rigorous review of hospital-reported data is important to protect patients, says Lisa McGiffert, director of the Consumers Union's Safe Patient Project. Hospital infections particularly threaten senior citizens with weakened immune systems. A recent report in the journal BMJ identified medical errors as the third-leading cause of death in the country. The report zeroes in on a persistent concern about deadly infections that patients develop as a result of being in the hospital. The bonuses and penalties are part of Medicare's Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting program, which is meant to reward hospitals for low infection rates and give consumers access to the information at the agency's Hospital Compare website. The IG's report, released Thursday, was designed to address concerns over whether hospitals are "gaming" a system in which it falls to the hospitals to report patient infection rates and, in turn, the facilities can see a bonus or a penalty worth millions of dollars. Such patterns could include a rapid change in results, improbably low infection rates or assertions that infections nearly always struck before patients arrived at the hospital. The IG said Medicare should have done an in-depth review of 96 hospitals that submitted "aberrant data patterns" in 20. Each year, Medicare is supposed to review up to 200 cases in which hospitals report suspicious infection-tracking results. Most hospitals report how many infections strike patients during treatment, meaning the infections are likely contracted inside the facility. Hospital-acquired infections are a big risk in health care, especially for older or seriously ill patients.Īlmost 100 hospitals reported suspicious data on dangerous infections to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services officials, but the agency did not follow up or examine any of the cases in depth, according to a report by the Health and Human Services inspector general's office.
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