IntelliHub April 19 2013
When hospitals make mistakes, causing patients to stay longer, insurers wind up paying for extended stays and extra care—which means hospitals have a financial disincentive to do the right thing.
“We found clear evidence that reducing harm and improving quality is perversely penalized in our current health care system,” Sunil Eappen, lead author and chief medical officer of Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, told the Harvard School of Public Health.
The study was conducted by the Boston Consulting Group, Harvard’s schools of medicine and public health, and Texas Health Resources, a large nonprofit hospital system that provided the records of 34,256 surgery patients for analysis.
More than 1,800 of these patients had one or more complications that could have been prevented, like blood clots, pneumonia or infected incisions.