After outcry from patient advocates, feds decide to publish hospital safety data after all

After pushback on their proposal to hide hospital safety data from public view, U.S. health officials now say they will publish the ratings after all.

The government previously said the COVID-19 pandemic had skewed the rates of preventable surgical complications such as bed sores, collapsed lungs, and bloodstream infections, and that publicizing these figures was unfair to hospitals.

But patient safety advocates widely panned the proposal, arguing that these numbers were all the more important in a period when health care was in greatest demand.

News of the reversal was cheered by Leah Binder, president and chief executive officer at the nonprofit Leapfrog Group, which incorporates the numbers into its own hospital safety ratings.

“The Leapfrog Group applauds CMS for finding a way to continue the public reporting of some of the most dangerous medical and surgical complications that happen in hospitals,” she said in a statement.

While the data will once again be public, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is sticking with its original plan to eliminate any financial penalties for subpar hospital performance — for now.

That’s because there was a wide range in how COVID affected hospitals’ ability to deliver care, the agency said. At various times during the pandemic, hospitals in some parts of the country were jammed with patients while others were relatively unscathed. That made it hard to compare performance on the surgical complications, which are used in a composite score.

“CMS recognizes the importance of this measure for patients and providers and is finalizing the calculation and public reporting,” the agency said Monday.

The move to publish the scores is part of a much larger annual set of regulations by CMS that dictates how hospitals are reimbursed by the federal government.

The final rule also contains a new plan to track food insecurity, housing instability, and other socioeconomic measures that fuel disparities in hospital care.

And for the first time, CMS also will publish certain performance measures for specialty cancer hospitals, such as the proportion of patients who died from cancer after receiving chemotherapy in the last 14 days of life.

The safety scores will be published on Medicare’s Care Compare website, at www.medicare.gov/care-compare. They were last updated for the 18-month period ending Dec. 31, 2019.