Is There a Better Measure for Patient Safety?

When the federal government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released its annual ranking of hospitals by how well they protect patients from harm late in 2015, it didn’t spark front-page headlines. Even with a searchable database to look up hospitals in one’s own backyard, the story flew under the radar.

But the “hospital-acquired condition” rankings, which rate hospitals by how well they control infections and other conditions that patients can pick up within their walls, and penalize those that fall short, resulted in a combined loss of $13 million for 24 Michigan hospitals. That figure represents 1 percent of the Medicare payments to the hospitals that fell within the lowest 25 percent of the rankings (Using a 10-point scale, those hospitals with numbers above 6.75 were financially penalized).