HFMA News – Dec. 18, 2008.

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) has released a report on key issues related to adverse events in hospitals. These adverse events include the ‘never events,’ such as surgery on the wrong patient, which the National Quality Forum has said should never occur in a healthcare setting…  Click title to read more…

The report identifies seven issues as most critical to understanding the landscape of adverse events in hospitals, including:

• Wide variation in estimates, and difficulties in measurement, of the incidence of adverse events in hospitals.
• The growing prominence, and potential drawbacks, of nonpayment policies for adverse events.
• Barriers that may inhibit internal reporting of adverse events.
• Concerns over potential underreporting of adverse events to oversight entities.
• Legal concerns for patients and providers arising from public disclosure of adverse events.
• Slow adoption of recommended practices to prevent adverse events.
• Strategies that may accelerate progress in reducing the incidence of adverse events.

In a separate report, the OIG also looks at state reporting systems for adverse events in hospitals. A primary conclusion of this report is that, in the absence of a national system and federal guidelines regarding state reporting systems, states have developed disparate reporting systems that make data unsuitable for use in the aggregate to identify national incidence of adverse events and trends.

Read the OIG’s reports on key issues and state reporting systems.

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