CJR is short for Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement, a bundled payment program of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) that ties reimbursement to care quality. It takes effect on April 1, 2016, according to the blog post.
One infectious complication adds about $20,000 per admission, which could prove detrimental to the entire service line margin. At most hospitals, there’s room for improvement in reducing adverse events (AEs) of every variety. Acute renal failure and blood loss, in particular, are perennial problems in orthopedics as well as spine and cardiac surgery. At the average hospital, 15 to 20 percent of patients are getting a blood transfusion after surgery that adds approximately $2,200 per case and increases the risk of other complications such as infection.
Given the stakes, it remains a surprise that so many hospitals still lack visibility to their complication rates beyond the few measures being tracked by CMS (30-day readmissions, mortality rates and a few surgical infections). Even hospitals that know their complication rates often don’t know how to go about improving their outcomes.
To read the blog post in full and learn more about the surprisingly high cost of (preventable) complications, click here.
