Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services releasing hospital mistake data, after all
Your hospital’s mistakes will be public again, as federal regulators reverse course to resume publicly releasing data on errors.
Officials with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stopped publicly reporting life-threatening mistakes recently, after criticism from hospital leaders and associations that claimed the data were misleading. The data were removed from CMS’ hospital comparison site. They still were available on a public spreadsheet that could be accessed by the public.
CMS will make the data on eight hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) available on its website, http://tinyurl.com/nhly2tf. The eight conditions are:
foreign object retained after surgery;
air embolism;
blood incompatibility;
pressure ulcer stages III and IV;
falls and trauma;
vascular catheter-associated infection;
catheter-associated urinary tract infection;
manifestations of poor glycemic control.
Before the data were removed, the Hospital Compare website listed how often many hospital-acquired conditions occurred at thousands of acute-care hospitals in the United States.