{"id":14382,"date":"2018-01-05T10:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T10:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/associatednews.us\/content\/2018\/01\/05\/hospitals-nationally-hit-hard-by-medicares-safety-penalties\/"},"modified":"2018-01-05T10:00:14","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T10:00:14","slug":"hospitals-nationally-hit-hard-by-medicares-safety-penalties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.us\/content\/hospitals-nationally-hit-hard-by-medicares-safety-penalties\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospitals Nationally Hit Hard By Medicare's Safety Penalties"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jordan Rau<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n Each year, hundreds of hospitals lose 1 percent of their Medicare payments through the Hospital-Acquired Conditions Reduction Program. The penalties \u2014 now in their fourth year \u2014 were created by the Affordable Care Act to drive hospitals to improve the quality of their care.<\/p>\n

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As the federal government penalizes 751 hospitals for having too many infections and patient injuries, some states are feeling the cuts in Medicare payments more than others.<\/p>\n

This year’s punishments landed the hardest in Connecticut and Delaware, where Medicare penalized half of the evaluated hospitals, federal records show<\/a>. In New York and Nevada, 4 in 10 hospitals were penalized. A third were punished in Rhode Island and Georgia. (These figures do not include specialty hospitals automatically exempted from penalties: those serving veterans, children and psychiatric patients, and “critical access” hospitals that are the only institutions in their area.)<\/p>\n

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While every state except Maryland \u2014 which is excluded because it has a different Medicare payment system \u2014 had at least one hospital punished, some got off comparatively lightly. Of hospitals in Alabama, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, Ohio, Texas and nine other states, 16 percent or fewer of the institutions were punished. (State summaries can be found at the bottom of this post; a searchable list of individual hospitals penalized is here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The penalties \u2014 now in their fourth year \u2014 were created by the Affordable Care Act to drive hospitals to improve the quality of their care. Each year, hundreds of hospitals lose 1 percent of their Medicare payments<\/a> through the Hospital-Acquired Conditions Reduction Program.<\/p>\n

The program’s design is stern: Out of the roughly 3,300 general hospitals that are evaluated each year, Medicare must punish the worst-performing quarter of them \u2014 even if they have reduced their number of potentially avoidable mishaps from the previous evaluation period.<\/p>\n

“I have seen with my own eyes the improvement,” says Dr. Amy Boutwell<\/a>, a quality-improvement consultant in Massachusetts. “I hear hospitals say straight up, ‘We don’t want to be in the lowest quartile; we want to get out of the penalty zone.’ “<\/p>\n