WASHINGTON – The Department of Health and Human Services has announced a new program, developed under the Affordable Care Act, that's aimed at eliminating medical errors and reducing healthcare costs on a national scale.
The program, Partners for Patients, could save up to $50 billion in costs associated with prevented medical errors and help save 60,000 lives over the next three years, according to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Sorrel King, a patient advocate who lost a child to medical errors, said such errors cause the same number of deaths as a jumbo jet crashing every day, yet not enough has been done to fix the problem.
"We cannot keep going at the pace we've been going," she said.
HHS will initially invest $1 billion in the program, to be spent on a total medical error elimination demonstration project and a nationwide education program, according to Sebelius. Major hospitals, employers, health plans, physicians, nurses and patient advocates have pledged commitment to the initiative, she said.
HHS will focus the plan initially on cutting hospital-acquired infections in Medicare patients by 40 percent and hospital readmission by 20 percent over the next three years, Sebelius said.
The program will also ask hospitals to focus on reducing nine types of medical errors and complications, including adverse drug reactions, pressure ulcers, childbirth complications and surgical site infections, according to Sebelius.
Donald Berwick, MD, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the program is not about blaming healthcare providers for medical errors, but about supporting them with knowledge of best practices and transparency and "very thoughtfully, respectfully" providing incentives for providers who reduce medical errors.
"Why not bring excellence to full scale?" Berwick asked. "We are in this together. We have to be in this together. The enemy is not each other; the enemy is harm itself."
"We think this could be huge," said David Cote, CEO of Honeywell and a Business Roundtable member. He predicted there would be "howls of protest" over the need for metrics, though they are "an essential part of the process."
America's Health Insurance Plans President and CEO Karen Ignagni said AHIP supports the effort.
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