Medicare has been publicly reporting ten types of preventible medical harms that occur in the hospital like broken hips from falls, blood clots, and bedsores for years. All of these harms are preventable and there is a large variation between hospitals in how often these incidents occur. They are very common. Preventable complications in the hospital kill 25,000 hospitalized Americans annually. 94,000 Medicare patients— one in four— are harmed by a preventable complication during a hospital stay. Patients and doctors were able to see the detail on this reporting and select a hospital for their care based on quality. More importantly, payment was linked to quality. There was a lot of pressure on hospitals to improve and that is entirely in the public interest. These are preventable harms to patients. Now the public reporting and ties to payment are being removed. That is a huge step backward.
In a related issue, only 14% of hospitals are following federal price transparency rules. These rules are an effort to solve a very important problem. When you go into the hospital to have a knee replacement, you have no way to know how much it will cost and there are huge, unpleasant surprises. The law required hospitals to tell you beforehand how much your stay would cost. “The largest hospital systems are effectively ignoring the law with no consequences,” the 61-page report said, noting that only two hospitals of 361 at three of the largest hospital systems were in compliance.”
The American healthcare industry spends over $600 million dollars annually on lobbying. That is the reason they can get away with these abuses which are harmful to everyone—including those who work in hospitals. We all depend on the same hospital system. We continue to talk about patient-centered care and never come close. The American Hospital Association alone spends over $12 million on moving the rules in their favor. The message? Do what you can to inform yourself and keep yourself healthy and out of the hospital. That is what this site is all about. That is what primary care teams focused on related chronic diseases are all about.
That is my intent to stay out of the hospital - period. After a 9-day hospital stay for "emergency surgery," my husband's life changed forever - his body recovered but his memory never did. I wasn't as informed as I could have been. So, thank you for bringing this information to the forefront.