New Database Reveals Thousands of Hospital Violation Reports New Database Reveals Thousands of Hospital Violation Reports

Hospital (Photo credit: Ralf Heß)

 

From the March 20, 2013 State Line article

 

Hospitals make mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes.  A patient may get the wrong medication or even undergo surgery intended for another person.  When errors like these are reported, state and federal officials inspect the hospital in question and file a detailed report.

Now, for the first time, this vital information on the quality and safety of the nation’s hospitals has been made available to the public online.

A new website, www.hospitalinspections.org, includes detailed reports of hospital violations dating back to January 2011, searchable by city, state, name of the hospital and key word.  Previously, these reports were filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), and released only through a Freedom of Information Act request, an arduous, time-consuming process.  Even then, the reports were provided in paper format only, making them cumbersome to analyze.

Release of this critical electronic information by CMS is the result of years of advocacy by the Association of Health Care Journalists, with funding from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.  The new database makes full inspection reports for acute care hospitals and rural critical access hospitals instantly available to journalists and consumers interested in the quality of their local hospitals.

The database also reveals national trends in hospital errors. For example, key word searches yield the incidence of certain violations across all hospitals.  A search on the word “abuse,” for example, yields 862 violations at 204 hospitals since 2011. …

 

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Doing the right thing when things go wrong

English: PACIFIC OCEAN (Aug. 10, 2007) – Lt. Cmdr. Angela Powell, an otolaryngologist assisted by Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Daniel Vogel a surgical technician, performs surgery aboard the Military Sealift Command (MSC) hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20). Comfort is on a four-month humanitarian deployment to Latin America and the Caribbean providing medical treatment to patients in a dozen countries. U.S. Navy photo by Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Jean A. Wertman (RELEASED) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

From the 14 December 2012 EurkAlert article

 

…UMHS approach to medical errors and malpractice suits could be used by hospitals nationwide, new study indicates

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The University of Michigan Health System doesn’t claim to be perfect. But its response to medical errors, near-misses, unexpected clinical problems and unintended outcomes is a model for the nation that other hospitals can and should copy, according to a new paper in a prestigious health care journal.

The “Michigan Model” for handling these situations, and preventing them from happening again, has not only helped patients and medical staff alike – it has also helped UMHS go against the grain of the costly, combative “deny and defend” medical malpractice culture…

…Campbell and Boothman have led a decade-long effort to implement and measure the results of the Michigan Model. It’s based on these key principles:

 

• Compensate patients quickly and fairly when inappropriate care causes injury
• Support clinical staff when the care was reasonable
• Reduce patient injuries (and claims) by learning from patients’ experiences

In that decade, new malpractice claims per month have dropped, total liability costs have dropped, claims and potential claims are being resolved faster, and UMHS is increasingly avoiding litigation in both claims without merit and claims with merit.

 

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First Glimpse at [Publicly Available] Medical Error Rates Separates the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

From the report by the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

By Sarah Dorsey Apr 25 2011 11:28 a.m.

Between Oct. 1, 2008 and June 30, 2010, Medicare patients at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Yonkers, N.Y., suffered thirteen instances of severe bed sores during their stay requiring additional treatment, a rate of nearly 2.9 per 1,000 treated. At St. John’s Riverside Hospital, three miles down Broadway from St. Joseph’s, the rate was 20 times lower: only one severe bed sore was reported, even though St. John’s discharged far more Medicare patients during that period — 8,270 to St. Joseph’s 4,541.

Over the protests of groups like the American Hospital Association, Medicare officials this month publicly revealed for the first time where harmful events like these took place. In addition to bed sores, the data includes information on trauma and falls, infections and the egregious errors known as “never events,” such as patients being given the wrong blood type, or foreign objects being left in the body after surgery.

As many as 98,000 Americans are thought to die annually from medical errors, and about as many succumb to infections they picked up during a hospital stay, according to oft-cited figures released a decade ago, but new research published last week suggests that “adverse events” like these occur about 10 times as frequently as previously thought, in about a third of all hospital stays.

Click on each incident type for a sortable spreadsheet with detailed information on each hospital….

(Clickable Table follows in this report, with additional text)

…While the numbers aren’t perfect, they’re a first-ever attempt by Medicare to publicly report patient safety data on individual hospitals. For the first time, the public can get a general idea of how many Medicare patients are sent home with conditions acquired in the hospital.

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Report: Hospital Errors May Be Far More Common Than Suspected

New tracking system uncovers 10 times as many medical mistakes

From the April 7 HealthDay news item

THURSDAY, April 7 (HealthDay News) — A new method for identifying medical errors contends that as many as 90 percent of hospital mistakes are overlooked.

The actual error rate is 10 times greater than previously thought, despite a recent focus on reducing error rates and improving patient safety, a new study suggests.

“The more you look for errors, the more you find,” said lead researcher Dr. David C. Classen, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Utah.

“There is a large opportunity for improvement, despite all the work that’s been done,” he said. “And we need better measurement systems to assess how we are doing in patient safety.”

One factor in the high number of errors is that hospital patients tend to be sicker than they were years ago, Classen noted. With the advent of outpatient treatment, “the healthier patients are no longer in hospitals,” he said…..

The report is published in the April issue of Health Affairs.
The abstract is here.
For suggestions on how to get this article for free or at low cost, click here.