Feds stop public disclosure of many serious hospital errors
From the article:
The federal government this month quietly stopped publicly reporting when hospitals leave foreign objects in patients’ bodies or make a host of other life-threatening mistakes.
The change, which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) denied last year that it was making, means people are out of luck if they want to search which hospitals cause high rates of problems such as air embolisms — air bubbles that can kill patients when they enter veins and hearts — or giving people the wrong blood type.
CMS removed data on eight of these avoidable “hospital acquired conditions” (HACs) on its hospital comparison site last summer but kept it on a public spreadsheet that could be accessed by quality researchers, patient-safety advocates and consumers savvy enough to translate it. As of this month, it’s gone. Now researchers have to calculate their own rates using claims data.
Isn’t this the same group that keeps sending out press releases abt people dying of drug overdoses. I guess that some deaths in our healthcare system needs to be “covered up” to protect the system itself…
I guess that this is a similar through process behind the 1/3 of the Boards of Pharmacy that require serious med errors to be reported and then the permit holder is left to determine if the med error is serious enough to report. The balance of the Boards of Pharmacy have NO REQUIREMENT to report med errors..
Filed under: General Problems
Priceless, thank you! Shared on Facebook.