•January 25, 2017•

By Trudy Lieberman
Rural Health News Service

Anyone facing a hospital stay for themselves or a family member should look at new data the government released right before Christmas showing that it http://khn.org/news/769-hospitals-penalized-for-patient-safety-in-2017-data-table/ penalized 769 of the nation’s hospitals for having high rates of patient injuries. The monetary penalties – a reduction for the year in their reimbursement for treating Medicare patients – do bite. Larger teaching hospitals could lose as much as $1 million or more.

This is the third year the government has penalized hospitals in an effort to prevent avoidable patient deaths in hospitals, which emerged as a big issue about 18 years ago. This year the government added injuries caused by MRSA and C diff infections to their list of other harmful conditions patients contract in a hospital such as urinary tract and surgical site infections resulting from hysterectomies and colon procedures. MRSA – a staphylococcus bacterium - can cause pneumonia and bloodstream infections. C diff is a germ that can multiply in the gut when patients are taking other antibiotics to kill other germs.      Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.