Medicare plans to stop posting some hospital safety data
After Ann MacDonald’s 82-year-old mother, Betty (above left), died in a Rhode Island hospital after developing sepsis after surgery, she has wondered about hospital safety. She turns to Care Compare, a federal government website that compiles hospital quality data in a user-friendly format, to look at its star ratings whenever she or a loved one needs hospital services. But Care Compare shrank during the pandemic, and Medicare, the federal agency that maintains the website, wants to trim even more of the measures from the data it’ll release next year.
Medicare proposes to keep under wraps a composite score made of 10 metrics of patient safety and adverse events, including pressure ulcers, hip fractures, and sepsis after surgery, the condition that killed MacDonald’s mother. Patient safety groups aren’t buying the agency’s argument that the change is fair given hospitals’ pandemic strain. STAT’s Tara Bannow explores.
Filed under: General Problems
Leave a Reply