While the CMS Hospital-Acquired Conditions (HACs) are believed to represent potentially avoidable complications of care, it is evident that many of these adverse outcomes occur each year.
In fiscal year 2016, nearly 28,000 patient safety adverse outcomes across 14 HACs were reported among 20,297,766 civilian inpatients.* The total cost of HACs in terms of days of stay, mortality, and costs of care are a function of the frequency of the adverse outcome and the incremental impact of the HAC on the measure of interest.
Researchers from IBM® Watson Health™ set out to evaluate the incremental consequences of selected inpatient adverse outcomes from selected CMS Hospital-Acquired Conditions (HAC) in terms of mortality, length of stay, and total hospital cost per case using all-payer data from acute care hospitals in the U.S.**
*Federal fiscal year 2016, IBM Projected Inpatient Data Base.
**Federal fiscal year 2016, IBM Projected Inpatient Data Base.
