July 11, 2022 – In the wake of the chaos and turbulence of the COVID-19 pandemic, CMS is looking to hide a rating that allows consumers to compare the safety records of hospitals, as well as waiving about $350 million in “financial penalties for roughly 750 hospitals with the worst patient-safety track records,” according to a report from Physician’s Weekly. These metrics were not intended to take the complexities of a pandemic, causing workforce shortages and overwhelming patient surges for healthcare systems, into account.
“Safety, transparency, and quality of care of patients is not enhanced by the use of skewed or inaccurate data, and, in fact, could result in negative consequences for patients,” Dr. Lee Fleisher, chief medical officer for CMS, told Physician’s Weekly. “CMS wants the public to have complete trust in the data and will make data on quality available when we have a high confidence in its credibility and accuracy.”
These metrics appear on Medicare’s Care Compare website, allowing consumers to view a broad range of quality metrics hospitals, like readmission rates and mortality rates. Under the CMS proposal, those scores would continue to appear, but Medicare’s Care Compare would not report data from the PSI 90 – the “Patient Safety and Adverse Events Composite” which includes how often patients had complications from preventable medical harm.
The penalties that CMS is looking to waive are issued annually through the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program. By removing the PSI 90 and other metrics skewed by the pandemic, CMS said “penalizing hospitals, as they have done in the past, would not be reasonable.”
Patricia Kelmar, director of health care campaigns for the nonprofit US Public Interest Research Group, argued that CMS wants to keep “patients, payers, and insurers in the dark on what happened during the pandemic.” Kelmar added, “There was no comma in the law that says, ‘Unless there’s a pandemic, you don’t have to pay these penalties.’”