Medicare will no longer pay for “treating preventable errors, injuries and infections that occur in hospitals,” according to the New York Times. Such preventable errors include leaving a sponge or other object inside a patient during surgery and giving a patient the wrong blood.
Such a policy obviously will put pressure on hospitals to get it right the first time (which they should be doing anyway), or they won’t get paid. An excerpt:
Hospital executives worry that they will have to absorb the costs of these extra tests because Medicare generally pays a flat amount for each case.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that patients develop 1.7 million infections in hospitals each year, and it says those infections cause or contribute to the death of 99,000 people a year — about 270 a day.
Intravenous catheters are widely used to provide hospital patients with medications, nutrition and fluids, but complications are relatively common.
One state, Michigan, has had spectacular success with systematic efforts to reduce infection rates in intensive care units.
Medicare will publish the new rules this week.
