People too often suffer medical complications in hospitals that might have been avoided with better care. These include infections, sepsis, bedsores (pressure sores) and falls that result in injuries. Medicare has in recent years sought to dock pay for hospitals considered to have a high number of cases of hospital-acquired conditions.
Deeper dive
Even with significant efforts by the U.S. government in recent years to combat hospital-acquired conditions, people still suffer harm during their stays. There were 86 hospital-acquired conditions, also called HACs, per 1,000 discharges for 2017, according to the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Resources (AHRQ). That’s a rate of almost one in 11 patients suffering some kind of harm during their stays, with adverse drug reactions and bedsores being among the most common complications.
The U.S. government raised the financial stakes for hospitals for failing to protect patients as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The law requires that the hospitals in the worst-performing quartile on scores for hospital-acquired conditions lose 1 percent of their Medicare payments for inpatient care.
There’s been continuing debate about how the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) judges hospitals and how well this penalty has worked to reduce harm to patients. Jordan Rau of Kaiser Health News in February 2022 dug into many of these issues in his story, “Health Care Paradox: Medicare Penalizes Dozens of Hospitals It Also Gives Five Stars.”