Medicares Hospital Compare Website No Longer Reliable
Remember when there was a move afoot to make hospital and medical errors more transparent by requiring reporting and disclosing hospital safety records to the public? The idea was you could go to Medicare’s Hospital Compare website and compare the quality of care provided by hospitals in your area based on real reported data of medical mistakes and avoidable “hospital acquired conditions”. Well, apparently you can now forget using Medicare’s website to reliably predict the quality of care offered by hospitals.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has recently quietly stopped reporting publicly when hospitals make life threatening mistakes like leaving object in a patient’s body after surgery, giving a patient the wrong blood type or failing to prevent avoidable air embolisms. CMS has removed data on several of these “hospital acquired conditions” (HAC’s) from its website. So, when you research hospitals and the quality of care provided, the information you get from Medicare’s informational website is not reliable.
Don’t you think the public deserves to know if one of three hospitals in their area has a disastrous patient safety record? We do. If you believe you have been the victim of medical malpractice or hospital negligence, contact us for a free legal consultation.