LAS VEGAS – Hospital quality and safety are improving across the board, with readmissions and health care–acquired infections falling fast, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The official data will be released in April, but Dr. Patrick Conway, chief medical officer and director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality at CMS in Baltimore, told attendees at the annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine that the preliminary numbers show "dramatic progress."
Over the last 2 years, U.S. hospitals have reduced harm for hospitalized patients by almost 10% nationally, saving 15,000 lives and more than $4 billion, he said. The estimate comes from chart reviews of all-cause patient harm measures such as central line–associated bloodstream infections, adverse drug events, pressure ulcers, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, and others.
Dr. Patrick Conway
Other quality improvements include:
• Central line–associated bloodstream infections down 40%.
• Surgical site infections down 22%.
• Early elective deliveries down more than 50%.
"You are improving so fast on quality process of care measures for CMS that we actually have to pull them out of the program," Dr. Conway told the audience of hospitalists. "We’ve removed almost half of the measures that were in hospital value-based purchasing in the inpatient quality reporting program over the last 3 years and that’s because the performance has increased so much."
Hospital readmissions – a measure that is getting increasing attention from hospitals now that CMS is tying it to payments – are also dropping. Medicare’s 30-day all-cause hospital readmission rate had been hovering around 19% or 20% nationally through 2011, but it has now dropped below 17.5%, Dr. Conway said.
"This is over 150,000 beneficiaries every year staying home and healthy," he said.
mschneider@frontlinemedcom.com
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