Starting Oct. 1, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid will change the way they reimburses hospitals for infections patients acquire after they are admitted.
GREENSBORO -- Patients who are hospitalized have a 1 in 10 chance of getting an infection, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It's called a Hospital-Acquired Condition, or HAC, and starting Oct. 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, will no longer cover several selected infections.
“An estimated 99,000 people died from these hospital-associated infections in 2002, exceeding the number attributable to several of the top ten leading causes of death reported in the U.S. vital statistics," said Herb Kuhn, and official with CMS.
That issue was the focus last December at a conference held by CMS with hundreds of health care providers. The agency announced it planned to make changes to the way it would reimburse hospitals for eight Hospital-Acquired Conditions.
“If a patient is discharged with one of eight complications in addition to the admitting diagnosis, Medicare will pay for the admitting diagnosis only and the hospital will absorb the cost of treating the condition acquired in the hospital," Kuhn explained.
Sue Decamp Freeze, an official with Moses Cone Health Systems in Greensboro, said these changes will not affect a patient's hospital bills. Instead, this ensures hospitals are using updated technology to keep patients healthy.
"Here are what we called evidence-based measures, processes that if you put these in place in your hospital, then you should be decreasing the number of those types of infections that you have," Freeze said.
The agency will also not cover an additional nine categories it is proposing to add later this year, but Freeze has some concerns with these additions, particularly ventilator-associated pneumonia.
“It's really difficult to classify and studies have shown about 50 percent of the time when they classify something as a ventilator-associated pneumonia it wasn't and about 50 percent of the time when it wasn't it was, and that was based on autopsies and things,” Freeze added.
CMS will make its final ruling on or before Aug. 1.