Patients at one of every five Maryland hospitals suffered higher-than-state-average rates of infections, pneumonia and other complications last year, and those medical centers will have to forgo $2.1 million as a penalty, regulators say.
The nine hospitals with higher rates include several in the Washington suburbs: Prince George’s Hospital Center, Shady Grove Adventist, Montgomery General, Doctors Community and Washington Adventist. The others are University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Civista Medical Center in La Plata and Memorial Hospital in Cumberland, which has since merged into the Western Maryland Health System.
Twenty-three hospitals – including Holy Cross, Howard County General, Suburban Hospital and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore – did better than the state average and will receive small bonuses. Scores for all 45 hospitals being tracked are posted online.
The results come from a program Maryland began in 2009 to reduce costly and harmful complications among hospitalized patients. State regulators track 49 different potentially preventable conditions, defined as problems unlikely to be related to a patient’s original admission, including bed sores, infections, strokes, injuries from falls, kidney failure or accidental punctures or cuts during medical procedures.
It is one of the broadest efforts nationally to tie financial incentives to how well hospitals perform in reducing dangerous and costly preventable complications. Neither the District nor Virginia has a similar program.
“We’re trying to move the bar up,” said Robert Murray, head of the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission, which oversees the program. He said a narrower list “would provide less of an incentive” for hospitals to invest in improvements.
While lauding the overall goal of reducing complications, the state’s hospital and doctor associations say the program is too broad and that a portion of the reported complaints could be simply record-keeping errors. More focused efforts on single issues – such as getting medical workers to wash their hands between patients – have a better chance of working, they say.
The most common complication suffered by hospitalized patients is heart arrhythmias – irregular heartbeats – that hit 286 of every 1,000 hospitalized patients statewide in 2010.
Other common complications included post-operative bleeding, affecting 13 per 1,000 patients, and renal failure without dialysis, affecting 11 of every 1,000. The state data show the lowest-scoring hospital as Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly, with four of every 1,000 patients having a reported complication.
John O’Brien, president of Prince George’s Hospital Center, says the problem mainly lies in how the hospital tracks, codes and reports data, not in patient care. Reviews of patient charts, he said, show “there is a vastly lower rate of complication than what we report” and that there is “no reason for people to be concerned about the quality of care they receive in this hospital.”
“Posting this data and showing [hospital] performance can result in some change,” said Carmela Coyle, president and chief executive of the Maryland Hospital Association. “But what you really want to get at is how do you prevent infections, what interventions do you need” to avoid these complications?
Maryland is the only state that sets hospital rates, and it will use that authority to penalize poor performers in the program by reducing the amount they can raise rates next year. Prince George’s Hospital Center will have a lower increase next year as a result, costing it $891,000.
Those that get average or better scores will receive small extra increases in their rates for next year.
In the state program, regulators determine what is an expected number of complications each hospital should see, based on a statewide average. Then they calculate whether each hospital’s actual rate is above or below that. The predicted rates are adjusted to reflect each hospital’s mix of patients so that hospitals that see sicker-than-average patients are not unfairly penalized. Trauma and cancer cases are excluded from the program.
Although he applauded the program, Anthony Slonim, the chief medical officer at Shady Grove, said hospitals are not waiting for the data from the state but are moving forward “on a variety of things to improve quality of care every day.”
The Maryland program is complex, he said, and complication rates can change from year to year, “whether or not you are improving care.” But, he pointed out, his hospital focused on keeping patients on ventilators from developing pneumonia – and had no cases in the past year as a result.
At the University of Maryland Medical Center, spokeswoman Mary Lynn Carver said the complexity of the patients it sees can “make it very difficult to determine what is an expected level of complication.” The hospital has a program to reduce infections among patients who have a catheter inserted in a vein to help deliver medications, she says, which resulted in a sharp drop in such infections from July to September last year.
This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
