Update on CMS’ 13 Hospital Acquired Conditions
I’ve been surprised that the vendor trade press hasn’t had more on the recent move by CMS to stop reimbursing hospitals for 13 specific hospital-acquired conditions, aka, adverse events. This will have a profound impact on hospital buying decisions in the coming years. Of course the changes will be slow – this is health care, after all.
For those of you that missed the original post, you can find it here. And here is a link to a Google search that should bring up all the Internet content on this topic. The news has been picked up, and here are some interesting links.
- The trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans’ (AHIP) consumer facing web site, HealthDecisions.org has a story with lots of great statistics and cost numbers. I doubt payors will lag far behind CMS in denying reimbursement for a growing number of preventable adverse events (which, of course is most adverse events;
- Ingenix’s SDRG Report blog (yes, a health care IT vendor blog!) mentions the 13 conditions in this blog post;
- Accounting and advisory firm BKD has a mention on page two (pdf) in a recent newsletter;
- The American Nurses Association has a bit on the infamous 13;
- And, HealtLeaders Media includes a mention of the 13 in an update on the proposed CMS changes for 2008.
Finally, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) has published a great white paper (pdf) on the costs of hospital-acquired infections. (They have an interesting listserv too.) The paper shows that even with reimbursement, hospitals lose money on hospital-acquired infections. As payors end reimbursement for preventable adverse events, costs will increase – keep that in mind as you see “average reimbursement” in the white paper.
UPDATE: The ECRI Institute published a brief paper on this topic in November of 2007 (6 months after you read about it on this site).
