Daily News | The feds want to hide hospital safety scores during COVID, making it harder to evaluate yours
Citing the impact of COVID-19, Medicare has proposed not publishing which hospitals scored below average, average, or better than average on certain complications of surgery during the pandemic.The last time Medicare rated hospitals on surgical complications such as bed sores, collapsed lungs, bloodstream infections, and broken hips, four Philadelphia-area facilities scored worse than average.
But the solution is not to hide the results from public view, said Leah Binder, president and chief executive officer of the Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit that uses these data and others to evaluate hospital safety. Chestnut Hill Hospital scored four stars overall, while St. Mary’s earned three stars, and Nazareth just two.
That logic makes sense, said Jolene Calla, vice president for health care finance and insurance at the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania. But as for the penalties ordinarily based on both indicators — the surgical complications and the infections — the proposal would eliminate them for now.While no rates of complications have been made public for individual hospitals during the pandemic, national numbers suggest that hospitals had problems during COVID.