Did CMS take into account unintended consequences with "no pay" events?
Patient Safety Monitor Alert
July 8, 2009
In his most recent blog post, Robert Wachter, MD questions the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) policy of withholding payment for a specified list of "never events" that it considers preventable on his blog "Wachter's World". Since October 2008, hospitals have been grappling with how to prevent this set of events from occurring—or else they will fail to be reimbursed by CMS.
Wachter calls out two recent journal articles concerning two of the "no-pay" events (catheter-associated urinary tract infections and patient falls) that suggest these events are not entirely preventable.
