Two insurance companies to stop paying for hospital errors
Patient Safety Monitor Alert
January 16, 2008
Two major insurance companies, Aetna and WellPoint Inc., have decided to stop paying for certain hospital errors themselves or prevent hospitals from billing patients for procedures that ended in hospital errors, reports The Wall Street Journal. This comes after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced it would no longer reimburse hospitals for eight preventable events starting in October 2008.These insurance companies are choosing which errors to not pay for. Aetna is using the 28 "never events" outlined by the National Quality Forum (NQF) and WellPoint focuses on four events from NQF's list. The ultimate goal is to discourage the events from happening at all, says the article.
To read the article, click here.
