More than 700 hospitals — including some ranked among the nation's 'best' — will be paid less by Medicare after the federal government pronounced that they had higher rates of infections and patient injuries than others.
Now in their sixth year, the punishments, known as HAC penalties, remain awash in criticism from all sides. Hospitals say they are arbitrary and unfair, and some patient advocates believe they are too small to make a difference. Research has shown that while hospital infections are decreasing overall, it is hard to attribute that trend to the penalties.
Medicare is cutting every payment by 1% for those hospitals over the course of the federal fiscal year, which started in October and runs through the end of September. Since the program's onset, 1,865 of the nation's 5,276 hospitals have been penalized for at least one year, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis.
Many hospitals escaped penalties because they were automatically excluded from the program, either because they solely served children, veterans or psychiatric patients or because they have special status as a"critical access hospital" for lack of nearby alternatives for people needing inpatient care.This year, 145 hospitals received their first penalty, the analysis found. Conversely, 16 that had been penalized every year since the start of the program avoided punishment this time.
Novant Health says it lowered infection rates by being more discriminating in using urinary catheters and central lines, by standardizing the steps to prevent infections in surgeries and by getting staffers to wash their hands more often.
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