Elizabeth Woodruff drained her retirement account and took on three jobs after she and her husband were sued for nearly $10,000 by the New York hospital where his infected leg was amputated.
Minnetonka-based United Healthcare announced it would pledge to have no “out-of-pocket” expenses for diabetes patients who cannot afford insulin medication starting January 1.
A Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposal to pause public reporting on the inpatient patient safety indicator measure for one year due to the pandemic “is not only consistent with a commitment to transparency, but important for maintaining the credibility of the information shared with the public,” writes Akin Demehin, AHA’s senior director of quality and patient safety policy.
In 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) overhauled the Hospital Overall Quality Star Ratings methodology with the expressed purpose of making ratings more transparent, equitable, stable and predictable.
AHA commissioned KNG Health to assess whether these methodological changes have fully achieved CMS' goals, while also estimating expected performance variation and drivers of performance and variation under the new methodology. Based on this analysis, it’s clear that CMS has more work to do to ensure that these ratings are equitable.
Rural hospital closures only picked up steam during the pandemic. And some of those that went out of business may have a harder time than others attempting a comeback.