One of the little known secret about hospitals is that they stand to make much more money when mistakes are made, than when everything works according to plan. And that translates into a disincentive to correct practices that would exclude those errors or at least minimize them.
And the amount of money the hospital stands to gain when a mistake is made is quite a lot. In fact in some hospitals observers have noticed a trend to discourage the improvement of quality in care and reducing harm to the patient.
The numbers speak for themselves: hospitals with more mistakes have a 330 % higher profit margin than those who had few or none. And that is because health insurance covers those mistakes.
Of particular notice should be the bills paid by Medicare, where there seems to be even greater emphasis on not getting things just right. Those patients, in fact, produced a 190% higher profit margin in surgeries with complications.
And even in cases where the hospitals had received guidelines to improve their safeguards following the study, they have been very slow to implement them.
This if nothing else, should be an alarm bell that warrants a call for health care payment reform. 'Hospitals should lose money, not gain from mistakes' says Atul Gawande, the study author, professor at Harvard school of Public Health.
The study analyzed 34,256 surgical inpatients during the year 2010, from 12, non profit, hospital systems in the southern United States. 1,820 of the procedures observed had resulted in at least one complication.
Source: The Raw Story 4.16.13
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