The map displays more than 300 California hospitals with symbols representing surgical infection rates for about a dozen procedures. The CDPH created the Healthcare Associated Infections interactive map to deliver infection information to consumers that’s less confusing. “When we started releasing these reports to the public, we were criticized for them not being consumer helpful.” “We have major pieces of data and charts and information on our website, but not necessarily user-friendly,” Gore said. Dozens of pages contain paragraph after paragraph describing sophisticated, hard-to-pronounce infection types, and there are long lists of links to reports and other health-related websites. ![]() The department’s Healthcare Associated Infections program posts information about surgical site infections and blood-related infections, but the voluminous data may exhaust readers’ patience. This story is adapted from a Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute news release.Reading hyper-detailed Web pages is challenging. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funded this study. The research was led by HMS researchers at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute with co-investigators from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reductions in payment may have been equivalent to as little as 0.6 percent of Medicare revenue for the average hospital thus, hospitals may not have made additional investments in prevention. With attention already focused on preventing health care–associated infections, the incremental effort of adjusting payment may have been limited.įinally, researchers suggest it is possible that the lack of effect was due to the very small financial incentives at stake. Second, some infections targeted by the CMS policy were already areas of focus for other improvement initiatives in the United States, led by the federal government, national organizations that focus on infection prevention and quality improvement, and accrediting agencies. Many hospitals may have simply responded by changing their billing practices rather than reducing true infection rates. Researchers note that there were strong downward secular trends for targeted health care–associated infections well before the implementation or announcement of the CMS policy.Īmong possible explanations for the findings, researchers suggest that the CMS measure uses billing codes assigned by hospital staff. The study found no incremental benefit of the policy among hospitals located in states without public reporting of infections or among hospitals with a high proportion of Medicare patients. Infection rates in the study hospitals were compared with rates for ventilator-associated pneumonia, which was not part of the CMS nonpayment policy. Researchers examined infection rates for central catheter–associated bloodstream infections and catheter-associated urinary tract infections, both of which CMS targeted for financial penalties beginning in 2008. ![]() As CMS continues to expand this policy to cover Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act, to require public reporting of NHSN data through the Hospital Compare website, and to impose greater financial penalties on hospitals that perform poorly on these measures, careful evaluation is needed to ensure that patient outcomes improve,” said Lee, who is also HMS associate professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital. ![]() “Instead, infection rates declined steadily independent of the penalties. ![]() “As federal policies increasingly use financial disincentives to reduce the risk of hospital-acquired conditions, our data show that this approach has had no effect on rates of targeted health care–associated infection,” said lead author Grace Lee, HMS associate professor of population medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. The results were published in the October 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that infection rates fell steadily throughout the period, unaffected by penalties.
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