Mass. hospitals agree not to charge for nine preventable errors
Hospitals in Massachusetts have agreed not to charge patients for costs caused by nine types of medical errors, from operating on the wrong part of the body to sending a baby home with the wrong parents.The mistakes are considered so preventable and so serious they are called “never events."
Sixty-one Massachusetts Hospital Association members have signed on to the program, the organization announced today. The nine adverse events are:
-- Surgery on the wrong body part
-- Surgery on the wrong patient
-- Wrong surgical procedure
-- Foreign object left inside the body
-- Patient death or serious disability associated with an air embolism
-- Patient death or serious disability associated with a medication error
-- Patient death or serious disability associated with a reaction to the administration of incompatible blood or blood products
-- Artificial insemination with the wrong donor sperm or wrong egg
-- Infant discharged to the wrong family
Some of the hospitals already abide by other voluntary agreements not to bill patients for treating the avoidable harm they have caused. More than half of Massachusetts hospitals told the national quality organization The Leapfrog Group earlier this year that they no longer charge for 28 errors, from wrong-site surgery to dangerous medication errors.
After October 2008, Medicare will no longer pay for eight preventable mistakes made by hospitals. Its list includes complications from falls, objects left inside patients during surgery, pressure ulcers, and three types of hospital-acquired infections.
The Massachusetts hospital group chose its nine events from the National Quality Forum, a public-private partnership whose goal is to measure and report healthcare quality. The MHA list, which overlaps some of the Medicare list, will be expanded to include more adverse events after hospitals adopt the policy for the first nine early next year, Karen Nelson, vice president for clinical affairs at the hospital association, said in an interview.
MHA selected events that were serious, preventable, caused harm and over which the hospital had some control, Nelson said.
"We will definitely add more, but we have learned this is hard to do," she said. "On its face it sounds very simple: Don’t charge for these events. But implementing that is tricky to figure out and to be fair to patients, to payers and other providers involved in the care. That's why we want to start with the smaller list."
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Elizabeth Cooney is a former
health reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, where she also was a
business reporter and an editor. Earlier in her career, she edited medical
books and journals at Little, Brown, and worked for Boston magazine.Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
- Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor
- Ishani Ganguli, Short White Coat blogger
Hospitals Should not only NOT charge, they should also pay COMPENSATION for failing to correctly do the the job they contracted to do, and restitute the damage done to the patient.
If a builder contracts (agrees) to build a house facing south, and if he builds it facing north, it is not enough that the builder not charge. The builder has to pull down the wrong construction at his OWN EXPENSE, and rebuild the house as agreed upon. Then and then only would he be entitled to payment, only after any fines for late delivery of the project etc. have been levied.
Hospitals and doctors also have to face the same rules with respect to their clients.
What is most troubling about hospital error are policies that beg for disaster. I would like to see changes, for example, in the frigid temperatures that are commonly maintained throughout hospitals, which studies have shown are not advantageous for healing. Recently at the hospital accompanying my elderly mother, I repeatedly called for blankets. I joked to a technician that patients must be kept refrigerated so they don't get moldy. But more seriously, I suspect that this below room temperature policy led to my father's death by pneumonia in another area hospital. Another example: I wonder if the medical mania for antibacterial gels works against proper hygiene by excusing neglectful hand washing. This mistaken practice may carry resistant pathogens everywhere.
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