When a surgeon-in-training takes part in an operation, the patient's risk of serious complications appears to be no greater than normal, a U.S. study finds. Looking at data on more than 60,000 surgeries done in the U.S. between 2005 and 2007, researchers found that when a resident was involved, just under six percent of patients had a major complication like severe bleeding or a serious post-surgery infection, such as pneumonia. The rate was the same for surgeries where no resident took part.
Reports of errors in Oregon hospitals grew slightly last year, according to the Oregon Patient Safety Commission. But that might actually be good news. The commission relies on voluntary reporting, and has been struggling to persuade hospitals to improve their reporting. Lawmakers created the commission in 2003 as a collaboration between state officials and the health care industry, including hospitals. The number of hospital errors reported in 2011 represents a slight improvement over prior years, but is still a tiny fraction of the number thought to be occurring and go unreported, based on research.
Medicare's new crackdown on readmissions will hit hospitals that treat large numbers of low-income patients especially hard, a Kaiser Health News analysis shows. The KHN analysis separated hospitals into four groups based on an index that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services uses to decide whether a hospital deserves extra payments for treating large numbers of low-income patients. One hundred hospitals in the group with the most poor patients—12 percent—will receive the maximum penalty from CMS: a 1 percent decrease in their reimbursements starting in October. By contrast, only 47 hospitals, or 6 percent, in the group with the fewest poor patients will receive the maximum penalty, the data show.
A California state auditor's report shows that nonprofit hospitals have significant leeway in determining how much charity care they provide to the neediest patients. A state Senate committee will discuss that issue and others at a hearing Wednesday as part of the debate over whether nonprofit hospitals do enough to justify their tax-exempt status. Critics have said some nonprofit hospitals skimp on charity care while amassing large reserves and paying hefty salaries to executives. Some nonprofit hospitals have also come under scrutiny for aggressive collection practices against the uninsured over unpaid medical bills.
More than 2,000 hospitals—including some nationally recognized ones —will be penalized by the government starting in October because many of their patients are readmitted soon after discharge, new records show. Together, these hospitals will forfeit about $280 million in Medicare funds over the next year as the government begins a wide-ranging push to start paying healthcare providers based on the quality of care they provide. With nearly one in five Medicare patients returning to the hospital within a month of discharge, the government considers readmissions a prime symptom of an overly expensive and uncoordinated health system. Hospitals have had little financial incentive to ensure patients get the care they need once they leave, and in fact they benefit financially when patients don't recover and return for more treatment.
Doctors who order tests for hospital patients don't always read the results before the patient is discharged, raising the risk of missing potentially dangerous conditions, an Australian study found. About half of the unread tests were ordered on the day the patient left the hospital, according to research today in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Many of those results still hadn't been reviewed two months later, the researchers said. Researchers looked at 6,736 inpatient admissions and 662,858 individual medical tests. Of those tests, 3 percent weren't reviewed at discharge and 7 percent were requested on the day the patient was leaving the hospital.