Hospitals Profit From Surgical Errors, Study Finds

[azurnoir]

Hospitals make money from their own mistakes because insurers pay them for the longer stays and extra care that patients need to treat surgical complications that could have been prevented, a new study finds.

Changing the payment system, to stop rewarding poor care, may help to bring down surgical complication rates, the researchers say. If the system does not change, hospitals have little incentive to improve: in fact, some will wind up losing money if they take better care of patients.

The study and an editorial were published Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The study authors are from the Boston Consulting Group, Harvard’s schools of medicine and public health, and Texas Health Resources, a large nonprofit hospital system.

....................................

The median length of stay for those patients quadrupled to 14 days, and hospital revenue averaged $30,500 more than for patients without complications ($49,400 versus $18,900). Private insurers paid far more for complications than did Medicare or Medicaid, or patients who paid out of pocket.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/health/hospitals-profit-from-surgical-errors-study-finds.html

[limpyhobbler]

1. du rec.

I had posted this article at Good Reads. I didn't know there was a Health forum.

[mopinko]

2. doesn't the aca

have a provision that medicare will not pay for readmissions? and/or factor that into their rates for certain hospitals?

[cbayer]

3. The flaw in this article is equating errors with complications.

The JAMA abstract never uses the words "error" or "mistake". Complications are a known risk factor for surgery, particularly certain kinds of surgeries. As the article notes, they are pretty unusual, only occurring in about 5% of the cases they studied.

The media is twisting this story into one about "errors" because it's sexier, but it's deceptive.

[Celebration]

4. here is the quotation from the article

"Of those patients, 1,820 had one or more complications that could have been prevented, like blood clots, pneumonia or infected incisions."

The idea would be to reduce the complication rate by rewarding hospitals that have the lower rates.

It doesn't seem deceptive to me.

To prevent pneumonia, you have to make sure patients sit up, for instance. You may not eliminate every single case of pneumonia that way, but clearly hospitals have different rates of "complications."

My father in law went into the hospital once without a bedsore, and came out WITH a bedsore. He was bedridden before he went into the hospital. Should that EVER happen?

[CanSocDem]

5. Another thing to remember...

...is that the entire medical industry suffers a profit-loss in a healthy market.

Another truism in the bizarro world of freemarket medicine.

.