Cyrus Dugger

How to Reduce Medical Costs, Lawsuits & Deaths at the Same Time

The tort “reform” movement blames lawyers and lawsuits for the increasing cost of medical care.

Whether or not you buy that argument (and this blog has argued many times that you should not) the following article makes clear that the best way to “get rid” of high medicalcosts, lawsuits, and medical deaths is to reduce the large amount of avoidable medical errors occurring in America’s hospitals.

Reducing medical errors such as infections also just makes good economic sense, because it generally keeps costs down for patients and insurers alike. It also saves lives…if that matters to anybody out there.

Every year between 44,000 and 98,000 people die from preventable medical errors.

Studies: Hospitals Could Do More to Avoid Infections
Poor Hygiene, Operating Room Traffic, Antibiotic Use Are Cited
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 21, 2006; A03
Infections acquired in hospitals, which take a heavy toll on patients, arise mainly from poor hygiene in hospital procedures, not from how sick patients were when they were admitted, according to three new studies.
The studies, published yesterday in the American Journal of Medical Quality, provide new evidence for experts who argue that hospitals could prevent many of the growing number of infections that afflict patients nationwide, cost billions of dollars to treat and are responsible for thousands of deaths each year.
“It’s the process, not the patients,” said David B. Nash, the journal’s editor and chairman of the Department of Health Policy at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. “These three groups independently found that despite hospitals’ claim that in the sickest patients it’s inevitable that someone is going to get a hospital-acquired infection, that’s just not the case.”
Rather than accepting some infections as unavoidable, Nash said, health professionals should do more to promote hand-washing among medical staff, take greater care in donning gowns and other infection-preventing clothing during medical procedures, reduce traffic in and out of operating rooms, isolate patients when necessary and use antibiotics more selectively.

“The new wave of research is showing that our previous expectations around what was preventable underestimated what we could actually achieve,” Foster said. “We can prevent more infections than we thought before. Lots of hospitals are striving to get to zero” infections.

Previous studies have shown that patients with hospital-acquired infections spend many more days in the hospital, undergo more extensive procedures and are more likely to die than patients who do not contract them. The problem has been the subject of congressional hearings and reports by the federal Institute of Medicine.
Solid national estimates are not available. But in Pennsylvania, the first state to collect such data, 19,154 patients contracted an infection in hospitals last year, up from 11,668 in 2004, according to a survey released last week by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. The council, a state agency, said some of the increase was because of better reporting by hospitals.
The average hospital stay in Pennsylvania was nearly 21 days for those with hospital-acquired infections, and five days for patients without them. The average hospital charge was $185,260 for those with infections, nearly six times the $31,389 incurred by others. Twelve percent of patients who acquired infections died, compared with 2.3 percent of other patients.

In one study released yesterday, researchers at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh found that age and severity of illness did not appear to be risk factors among 54 patients with ailments such as heart attacks and respiratory failure who contracted central line-associated bloodstream infections during the three-year period that was reviewed. On average, the hospital lost $26,839 caring for each patient, illustrating that there are financial advantages to reducing infections, the study found.
A second study, by researchers affiliated with provider Cardinal Health Inc. in Massachusetts, found that patients with hospital-acquired infections stayed in the hospital longer, were more likely to die and faced higher costs than patients with similar underlying illnesses who did not contract such infections. The severity of the effects of the infection could not be attributed to how sick the patient was on admission, the study found.

Posted at 1:00 PM, Jan 18, 2007 in Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)