It’s bad enough that hospitals can be dangerous places, yet most people check in to a hospital without knowing whether the hospital is safe for patients. For years now, Medicare has published some data on hospital safety and rated hospitals from one to five stars based on those ratings. Rachel Cohrs reports for Stat News that Medicare might stop doing so, although that information can help people avoid being admitted to an unsafe hospital.
Hospital-acquired infections can literally kill patients, and each year thousands of people die from them. One in four people with Medicare are harmed in the hospital. They get sepsis, a life-threatening infection, or some other serious illness while being treated for something else in hospital.
So, while Hospital Compare, Medicare’s online hospital quality comparison tool, is far from perfect, it’s worth checking out. Medicare also has tools for comparing nursing homes and other health care providers. But, the government agency that compiles the care compare data lost a bunch of funding and is looking to cut back on the data it provides the public.
Medicare wants to hide from public view 10 measures it has disclosed to promote patient safety and warn patients of poor quality. It wants to keep secret information on rates of hip fractures, sepsis post surgery and pressure ulcers in hospital. According to the Leapfrog Group, each year nearly 25,000 patients die from these hospital-acquired illnesses.
Of course, the hospitals love the idea that Medicare would stop publishing this data. They argue that it is imperfect because it cannot capture the condition of patients before they are admitted, which could make them more prone to harm in hospital. While that is true, it’s true for all patients at all hospitals.
As you would expect, patient advocates strongly oppose it because it exposes patients to a lot of risk. Without public data, it’s hard to drive health care facilities to improve the quality of care they provide their patients.
What’s super concerning is that Covid-19 has hurt patient safety in hospital significantly. In the first six months of 2021, US rates of central-line associated bloodstream infections in hospital were up 45 percent after having come down 31 percent in the five years before the Covid-19 pandemic. MRSA infection rates were up 39 percent. Yet, informing the public about patient safety appears to be low on the Biden administration’s agenda.
To be clear, pre-pandemic, some hospitals performed extremely poorly from a quality perspective. The HHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that, in 2018, 25 percent of Medicare patients who were hospitalized suffered from some time of harm while in hospital. In 2010, a similar OIG analysis found the same rate of harm to Medicare patients.
As proposed, Medicare would still collect quality data. But, it would not impose fines on hospitals that performed poorly on the quality measures.
Here’s more from Just Care:
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