Medicare Stops Paying Hospitals For Medical Errors
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will no longer reimburse hospitals for ten categories of preventable medical errors that result in serious risk of injury to patients. CMS prohibits hospitals from charging people with Medicare for the additional costs associated with treating these conditions.
Hospitals will now assume the costs of procedures associated with so-called “never events”. While Medicare will save $21 million as a result of the new policy, the primary purpose of the rule is to improve quality of care for people with Medicare by creating greater incentives for doctors and hospitals to avoid preventable errors. The expectation is that if these errors affect hospitals’ overall budgets, doctors and hospitals will take more aggressive measures to prevent these errors.
The ten categories of “never events” Medicare no longer covers include:
- remedial treatments related to foreign objects retained by patients after surgery
- transfusion of incompatible blood
- falls and traumas during a hospital stay
- manifestations of poor glycemic controls
- catheter-associated urinary tract infections
- surgical site infection following a coronary artery bypass graft or orthopedic surgery
- and deep vein thrombosis/pulmonary embolism.
-From: MEDICARE WATCH, a biweekly electronic newsletter of the Medicare Rights Center; Vol. 11 , No. 21 : October 14, 2008.
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