Thursday, September 11, 2014

The Feds Reverse Course and will Release Data on Hospital Mistakes

Federal regulators are reversing course and will resume publicly releasing data on hospital mistakes, including when foreign objects are left in patients' bodies or people get the wrong blood type.
USA TODAY reported last month that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly stopped publicly reporting a host of life-threatening mistakes, after denying in 2013 that it would do so.
CMS says it will make this data on eight "hospital-acquired conditions" (HACs) available on its website.
"We are working to make it available as a public-use file for researchers and others who are interested in the data," CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said in an e-mail. "It's been requested, so we will make it available."
The data were removed last summer from CMS' hospital comparison site but kept on a public spreadsheet that could be accessed by quality researchers, patient-safety advocates and consumers who could translate it.
Then, last month, it was gone altogether. It's coming back, although the data are not expected to be available until later this year, said Leah Binder, CEO of the Leapfrog Group, a non-profit organization that publishes hospital safety ratings. She expects to incorporate it in her ratings that come out in the spring.
Read the rest of the story HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.


No comments: