Our thanks to one of our readers who sent information about this article in El Diario de El Paso. You may want to use Google translate if your Spanish isn’t good enough to read it.
According to the article Medicare will penalize our county hospital one percent of their reimbursements next year because of what Medicare has classified as “preventable errors”. The penalties evidently started three months ago on October 1, 2014 and were for problems that were observed before then.
One cannot help but wonder if our hospital administrator told his board about the medical problems before he got his bonus.
The hospital was found deficient in three different areas including avoidable infections and surgical complications. With 10 being the worst score that is assigned, our county hospital received a 10 in all three areas. If a hospital receives a score of 7 or higher the law requires that the penalties be assessed.
In our case that will evidently amount to about $350,000.
In Denial
The article went on to say (using Google’s translation service) that according to the head of the hospital’s quality control effort “patients should not be concerned about these scores as only 18 patients from a total of 33, 598 experienced serious medical complications.” Further from the article “He explained that the figure presented by avoidable errors is less than one percent, making clear that UMC continues to literally committed to providing quality health care.”
Don’t worry. We know what we are doing. Those people over at Medicare don’t know how to run a hospital like we do.
I suspect that the hospital’s response will be to point out the tuberculosis problem that another local hospital had last year as if two wrongs make a right. At least in the TB situation the hospital addressed the problem aggressively and did not tell us that they only hurt a few people.
We deserve better
Brutus
Posted by Brutus 
elpasospeak 
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