The federal government has penalized 764 hospitals, including more than three dozen it simultaneously rates as among the best in the country, for having the highest numbers of patient infections and potentially avoidable complications, according to a report by Jordan Raul at Kaiser Health Network.
For the penalized hospitals, Medicare payments are reduced by 1% for each bill from October 2021 through September 2022. The total amount of the penalties is determined by how much each hospital bills Medicare. The punishments, which the Affordable Care Act requires be assessed on the worst-performing 25% of general hospitals each year, are intended to make hospitals focus on reducing bedsores, hip fractures, blood clots, and the cohort of infections that before COVID-19 were the biggest scourges in hospitals. Those include surgical infections, urinary tract infections from catheters, and antibiotic-resistant germs like MRSA.
This year’s list of penalized hospitals includes Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles; Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago; a Cleveland Clinic hospital in Avon, Ohio; a Mayo Clinic hospital in Red Wing, Minnesota; and a Mayo hospital in Phoenix. Paradoxically, all those hospitals have five stars, the best rating, on Medicare’s Care Compare website.
Another issue raised by researchers and the hospital industry is that under the law, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services each year must punish the quarter of general care hospitals with the highest rates of patient safety issues even if they have improved and even if their infection and complication rates are only infinitesimally different from those of some non-penalized hospitals.
In a statement, CMS noted it had limited ability to alter the program. “CMS is committed to ensuring safety and quality of care for hospital patients through a variety of initiatives,” CMS said. “Much of how the Hospital-Acquired Condition (HAC) Reduction Program is structured, including penalty amounts, is determined by law.”
The KHN analysis found that the government penalized 38 of the 404 hospitals that were both included in the hospital-acquired conditions evaluation and had received five stars for “overall quality,” which CMS calculates using dozens of metrics. Those include not just infection and complication rates but also death rates, readmission frequencies, ratings that patients give the hospital after discharge, and hospitals’ consistency in following basic protocols in a timely manner, such as giving patients medicine to break up blood clots in the 30 minutes after they display symptoms of potential heart attacks.
In addition, 138 of 814 hospitals with the next-highest rating of four stars were docked by the program, KHN found.
