The column was authored by Peter J. Pronovost, MD, PhD, the senior vice president for patient safety and quality and the director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at John Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.
According to Dr. Pronovost, the government uses a flawed process to generate hospitals’ patient safety scores, basing the methodology on billing information as opposed to clinical records. This process can lead to a high rate of false positives, resulting in hospitals getting penalized.
In addition to issues with billing codes, many hospitals appear worse than they actually are when they look harder for preventable harm. For instance, hospitals that aggressively screen for blood clots in patients score worse than hospitals that do not screen patients, according to Dr. Pronovost.
Despite the potential penalties hospitals may face for not putting more emphasis on their billing, coding and scores, Dr. Pronovost urged hospitals to focus on improving patient safety efforts by using proven, valid measures to provide high-quality care.
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