Patient Injuries: Hospitals Most Likely To Be Penalized By Medicare

Compensability extends in most jurisdiction to injuries sustained in the course of medical treatment for work related injuries. Medicare through enforcement wants to reduce treatment injuries. Today's post was shared by Kaiser Health News and comes from www.kaiserhealthnews.org

Medicare has identified 761 hospitals that are in line to be penalized for high rates of infections and complications this fall. Some of these hospitals may avoid the penalties in the fall after federal officials factor into their analysis an additional year of infections.

Below are the 175 hospitals that are most likely to be penalized because their preliminary scores are nine or above on a scale of 1 to 10. You can download the complete list of all hospitals here. You can also read the KHN story, KHN explanation of how the penalty program works, and look at the KHN analysis.

Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
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Hospitals Are Become Even Deadlier Places for Sick People

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has reported that lethal drug-resistance bacteria is making its appearance at a growing rate at health care facilites. What has now been called a "nightmare of bacteria," CRE infections may now become a very serious complication of a work-related injury

"Drug-resistant germs called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, are on the rise and have become more resistant to last-resort antibiotics during the past decade, according to a new CDC Vital Signs report.  These bacteria are causing more hospitalized patients to get infections that, in some cases, are impossible to treat. 

CRE are lethal bacteria that pose a triple threat:

• Resistance: CRE are resistant to all, or nearly all, the antibiotics we have - even our most powerful drugs of last-resort.
• Death: CRE have high mortality rates – CRE germs kill 1 in 2 patients who get bloodstream infections from them.
• Spread of disease:  CRE easily transfer their antibiotic resistance to other bacteria.  For example, carbapenem-resistant klebsiella can spread its drug-destroying weapons to a normal E. coli bacteria, which makes the E.coliresistant to antibiotics also. That could create a nightmare scenario since E. coliis the most common cause of urinary tract infections in healthy people.

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