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Quality & Patient Safety

America’s Hospitals and Health Systems Remain More Dedicated than Ever to Patient Safety and Quality

Hospitals have always worked diligently to improve patient safety, making many important strides in the last two decades. Yet, various reports and rankings of hospital performance in recent months might lead you to believe that hospitals have taken their foot off the gas. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, hospitals have never stopped focusing on improving the care they provide, even under the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Quality Measures

Blog: Sustaining Quality Transparency While Accounting for COVID-19’s Unprecedented Challenges

Recent reports have mischaracterized Medicare’s proposals to account for the impact of COVID-19 in its quality measurement programs as “hiding” important and useful patient safety data from the public.

Star Ratings

Blog: Understanding CMS’ Changes to Hospital Overall Star Ratings

In 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) overhauled the Hospital Overall Quality Star Ratings methodology with the expressed purpose of making ratings more transparent, equitable, stable and predictable.

Affordable Care Act, Governance Effectiveness, Leadership, Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Quality & Patient Safety, Strategic Planning

America’s hospitals are committed to sharing meaningful, accurate hospital quality information with the patients they serve. Hospitals also support well-designed pay-for-performance programs that can help move the health care delivery system from volume to value.

At the same time, however, hospitals, their clinicians and the post-acute care organizations they work with are asked to provide data on a dizzying array of quality measures. The burden of collecting many of these measures often outweighs the benefit, and consumers can be confused by the volume of information.

Financial Oversight, Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Physician Fee Schedule (PFS)/MACRA/QPP, Physician Workforce, Quality & Patient Safety, Workforce

On April 16, President Barack Obama signed into law the .

Affordable Care Act, Financial Oversight, Quality & Patient Safety, Legislation and Legislative Advocacy, Care Delivery, Quality & Patient Safety, Financial Management

Reducing readmissions is an important way to improve quality and lower health care spending, and hospitals are making significant progress. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported that the national readmission rate (i.e., instances when patients return to the same or different hospital within 30 days of discharge) fell to 17.5 percent in 2013, after holding steady at 19 to 19.5 percent for many years.