By 2008, Medicare won't pay for hospital errors

1. Money is the most powerful lever that drives provider behavior 2. To effect the changes outlined in the Quality Chasm report of Institute of Medicine, relying on provider altruism has been a non-starter 3. Not paying for bad performance should not be cast as a conspiracy to reduce physician and other provider reimbursement 4. Unit cost and utilization must be managed if we are ever...

1)  Payment reductions for medical errors will not change provider behavior. 2)  Reduced payments to providers could accelerate medical errors.    

The last several years as seen the growth of financial incentives to stimulate improvements in patient safety and patient outcomes.  Clearly society has an interest in improving patient safety, and aligning providers and payers financially is a laudable goal. The use of denied payments raises the bar in that rather than rewarding safe practices, presumed unsafe practices are punished.  While...

Well....we know CMS doesn't have enough money to fund healthcare in perpetuity.   Physicians have been taking reimbursement cuts or lack of raises over the last 5 years.    Realizing you can't squezze enough money out of the physicians, Medican now brilliantly plans to penalize the hospitals for mistakes.    The goal here is to try to reduce medical errors...

In 2008, Medicare will no longer pay the cost for hospital care related to certain types of errors including some hospital acquired infections.  This continued decrease in reimbursement will hurt those hospitals most in need of new information systems and increased staffing.

Many hospitals are struggling with the finances of improving patient safety. This takes capitol. Having hospital penalized financially for medical errors some of which are inherent to the system, will only cause the demise of some institutions. What will happen to those patients? I guess the people in charge of Medicare would like to see New Orleans healthcare throughout the entire country.

- Some studies show that medical errors continue to increase despite an intense focus on this issue over the last recent years. This decision by CMS should bring even more attention to this whole area of patient safety and error prevention - There will need to be increased documentation to "prove" that an infection, for example, was present at admission or was not preventible or forseeable....