Quality and Safety

"Would incentives for improvement be greater if all pay-for-performance programs specifically considered improvement as part of scoring hospital performance?" authors ask.

Unless hospitals and other health care facilities begin cooperatively fighting the country's most aggressive bacterial-resistant germs, infection rates could increase as much as 10 percent over the next five years, hitting about 340,000 people annually, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released this week.

The business listing site has teamed up with ProPublica to integrate data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services onto the business pages of more than 25,000 healthcare facilities in the United States.

The worst-offending hospitals will see their Medicare reimbursements slashed by as much as 3 percent, though many on the list will be penalized less than 1 percent.

Last December, a 37-year-old patient with dissociative disorder died after hanging herself with a bedsheet and closet doorknob, a suicide that could have been prevented if Timberlawn used best practices.

Since the fines began, national readmission rates have dropped, but roughly one of every five Medicare patients sent to the hospital ends up returning within a month.

While bottom line impact may be tough to measure when it comes to financial investment, patients just want their own bottoms covered.

Accredited hospitals that offer advanced services, are major teaching institutions and have better performance and outcome measures are penalized more frequently than other providers for hospital-acquired conditions, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that claims to have exposed a major flaw with program.

Seven years after Congress passed a landmark law banning discrimination in the treatment of mentally ill people, many families and their advocates complain it stubbornly persists, largely because insurers are subverting the law in subtle ways and the government is not aggressively enforcing it.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will lift the rate it pays inpatient hospitals in 2016 by 0.9 percent, the agency announced Friday, as long as facilities participate in the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program and demonstrate meaningful use through the use of electronic health records.