Chief medical officer responds to report
Editor’s note: Comments on the Medicare ranking from Dr. Jay Reynolds, TAMC chief medical officer and chief clinical officer, were received after the BDN story was published.
“Any infection or injury is one too many,” said Reynolds. “At TAMC we believe that when it comes to patient safety, no number is an acceptable number. Certainly, we are disappointed to be on the list. This ranking reflects older data that goes back to 2011.
“We have a rigorous program already in place to ensure our patients receive the safest care possible. That has included the restructuring of our quality department, development of a new quality committee, the addition of the only two infectious disease specialists north of Bangor to our team of physicians, the board certification of our infection control manager, and other initiatives,” he added.
“We understand that there is always room for improvement and use information like this to advance our work to continuously improve patient safety and the overall patient experience. At the same time we are pleased to be recently recognized for excellence by Medicare and others. As we receive this report we also learn that TAMC will be among the hospitals to get a bonus in the coming year under Medicare’s value-based purchasing program. That payment is based on patient experiences, outcomes, clinical processes and more. This program was established in 2012 to reimburse hospitals for quality,” Reynolds said.
“We were also just recently recognized by the Joint Commission as a 2013 Top Performer on Key Quality Measures and were the only hospital north of Augusta to be recognized in all four measurements for attaining and sustaining excellence in accountability measure performance for heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical care,” he added.
About Medicare’s Value-Based Purchasing Program:
The CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) launched the value-based purchasing program in October 2012 in a major effort under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to reimburse hospitals for quality that marked a shift from pay-for-reporting initiatives such as the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program. The current adjustments are based on hospitals’ performance across 26 measures of clinical processes; patient satisfaction; and outcomes, including use of preoperative antibiotics, doctor-patient communication and mortality rates. They include 12 clinical process-of-care measures; eight patient-experience dimensions; five outcome measures; and one efficiency measure on spending per beneficiary.
A total of 1,698 hospitals will have their Medicare payments boosted in 2015, 467 more than in 2014, according to a Modern Healthcare analysis of data the CMS posted Dec. 17. A total of 1,360 U.S. hospitals will have their Medicare payments docked next year.
