Hospitalist Neal Axon, MD, first became aware of an important change in his hospital’s policies last year while attending to an elderly patient the morning after admission to the community hospital where he works part time.
“This new form appeared in the chart requesting a urinalysis for my patient, who’d had a Foley catheter placed,” says Dr. Axon, an assistant professor of medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “I didn’t know why, so I asked. I was told that it was now necessary to document that there was no UTI present on admission.” He asked the charge nurse, “So what do I do now that the catheter has been in place for 12 hours and has colonization without a true infection?”
The next thing he heard: silence.
The new form Dr. Axon encountered was an outgrowth of the requirements of the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2005, which ordered Medicare to withhold additional hospital payments for hospital-acquired complications (HAC) developed during a hospital stay. One result of the new rule is that much of a hospital’s response to these initiatives has been placed in the hands of the hospitalist. From accurate documentation of complications already present on admission (POA), to confirming that guidelines for treatment are being followed, to taking the lead on review of staff practices and education, hospitalists are in a position to have a wide-ranging impact on patient care and the financial health of their institutions.
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Congress Pushes Reforms
In order for Medicare to not provide a reimbursement, an HAC has to be high-cost and/or high-volume, result in the assignment of the case to a higher payment when present as a secondary diagnosis, and “could reasonably be prevented through the application of evidence-based guidelines,” says Barry Straube, MD, chief medical officer and director of the Office of Clinical Standards and Quality at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). “CMS was to implement a process where we would not pay the hospitals additional money for these complications.”
The new rules mean Medicare pays hospitals on the basis of Medicare Severity Diagnostic-Related Groups (MS-DRG), which better reflect the complexity of a patient’s illness. The biggest change was a three-tiered payment schedule: a base level for the diagnosis, a second level adding money to reflect the presence of comorbidities and complications, and a third for major complications and comorbidities (see Table 1, p. 31).
“Instituting HACs means that hospitals would no longer receive the comorbidity and complication payments if the only reason a case qualified for higher payment was the HAC,” Dr. Straube explains. “We did carve out a POA exception for those conditions that were acquired outside of the hospital. HACs only impact additional payments; the hospitals are still paid for the diagnosis that resulted in the hospital admission.”
CMS also identifies three “never events” it won’t reimburse for (see “A Brief History of Never Events,” p. 35): performing the wrong procedure, performing a procedure on the wrong body part, and performing a procedure on the wrong patient. “Neither hospitals nor physicians that are involved in such egregious situations would be paid,” Dr. Straube says.