For the first time, Medicare patients can see how often hospitals report serious conditions that develop during an inpatient hospital stay that could possibly harm patients. This data  about the safety of care available in America’s hospitals has been added to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Hospital Compare website.

These serious conditions, also known as hospital acquired conditions (or HACs), often result from improper procedures followed during inpatient care. The  data release shows the number of times a HAC occurred for Medicare fee-for-service patients between October 2008 and June 2010. The numbers are reported as number of HACs per 1,000 discharges, and are not adjusted for hospitals’ patient populations or case-mix.

Independent data from the Institute of Medicine estimates that as many as 98,000 people die in hospitals each year from medical errors that could have been prevented through proper care. Although not every HAC represents a medical error, the HAC rates provide important clues about the state of patient safety in America’s hospitals. In particular, HACs show how often the following potentially life-threatening events take place:

·        Blood infections from a catheter placed in the hospital;

·        Urinary tract infections from a catheter placed in the hospital;

·        Falls, burns, electric shock, broken bones, and other injuries during a hospital stay;

·        Blood transfusions with incompatible blood;

·        Pressure ulcers (also known as bed sores) that develop after a patient enters hospital;

·        Injuries and complications from air or gas bubbles entering a blood vessel;

·        Objects left in patients after surgery (such as sponges or surgical instruments);

·        Poor control of blood sugar for patients with diabetes.

In total, CMS reports HAC rates for 8 measures, which were selected because they incur high costs to the Medicare program or because they occur frequently during inpatient stays for Medicare patients. Furthermore, HACs usually result in higher reimbursement rates for hospitals when they occur as complications for an inpatient stay because they require more resources to care for the patient with the complication. Lastly, CMS considers HACs to be conditions that could have reasonably been prevented through the use of evidence-based guidelines for appropriate hospital inpatient care.

Editor's Note: We ran three different hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area that we considered well-known for their care and, in some cases, where we had (or a family member had been) hospitalized.  The tables also gave us the relative mileages so we could also compare those statistics in choosing a hospital.

CMS has gathered HAC rates from hospitals since 2007. Since 2008, Medicare has not provided additional reimbursement for cases in which one of the HACs was reported as having developed through the course of a patient’s hospital stay.

Rates for the 8 HAC rates reported on Hospital Compare vary among hospitals.  The most common HAC reported was injury from a fall or some other type of trauma, which occurred just once for every 2,000 discharges. Over 70 percent of hospitals reported at least one fall or trauma during the reporting period.