An increasing emphasis on patient safety in hospitals and the prospect of $1 billion in federal prevention money made for an unusual coalition Thursday involving Children’s Hospital, Medicare and AARP.
Safety advocates for young and old announced a new Affordable Care Act initiative to curb hospital- acquired infections, dangerous falls, medication mistakes and costly readmissions.
Pointing to recent infection scares and other errors at Children’s and other locations, the officials said prevention spending can save up to $35 billion nationwide in coming years through reduced hospital harm.
“Harm does occur. Our goal must be to eliminate it,” said Dr. Daniel Hyman, Children’s chief quality officer.
Hyman pointed to a high-profile recall case last fall. A boy in for a routine procedure at Children’s got an infection afterward, and the hospital’s infection investigators eventually traced it to alcohol wipes used commonly in all medical facilities.
The Children’s case helped finally push Triad Group to a voluntary recall of hundreds of millions of the pads.
At the older end of the patient scale, nearly one in five Medicare patients goes back to the hospital within 30 days of release, “and that’s absolutely unacceptable,” said Dr. Mark Levine, chief medical officer for the Denver regional Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
The federal initiative promoted Thursday includes expanding a readmission-prevention method perfected in Colorado that has already saved Medicare millions of dollars. Expansion of the pilot program was written into the Affordable Care Act by Sen. Michael Bennet, and federal officials have $500 million to broaden the program.
Children’s touted a safety measure it will implement this fall, a bar-code system for all medication. Nurses and other personnel use scanners to check prescription codes, including against bar codes on patient bracelets.
A 1999 study estimated up to 98,000 American patients die each year from preventable medical mistakes, according to .
