Do you like to do a little digging about mistakes that occur at medical facilities before you choose where to go for care? Well, your research just got a little bit harder because the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has removed a bunch of data about serious hospital errors from its public access databases, Time.com reports.
In fact, the federal government stopped disclosing eight easily avoidable “hospital acquired conditions” (a.k.a. HACs) from its Hospital Compare website. Some of these conditions include instances when patients were given the wrong blood type during transfusions or when they had foreign objects left in their bodies during surgery.
CMS says it removed HACs because they were relatively uncommon in U.S. hospitals. CMS also said it is working on a new set of rules for recording these mistakes.
But failing to disclose these potentially life-threatening errors could leave prospective patients in the dark until the new measurements roll out. What’s more, under the new federal health law, the number of HACs a hospital racks up helps determine the amount of Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement it can receive.
Fortunately, there are a number of other ways to uncover a hospital’s dirty details. Click here for tips.
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