Fines & Sanctions

Hospitals Show Financial Gains, But Smaller Facilities Struggle

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Connecticut’s acute-care hospitals ended the last fiscal year in slightly better financial health than in the prior year, with just five of 30 hospitals reporting losses, according to a new state report. Data filed with the state Office of Health Care Access (OHCA) shows that six hospitals had operating losses in the 2012 fiscal year – the same number as in 2011, but fewer than in 2010. When non-operating gains and losses are included, five hospitals had negative total margins, or deficits – down from eight in 2011. The annual OHCA report paints a positive picture of the overall financial health of hospitals, highlighting that Connecticut’s hospitals had a total gain from operations of about $513 million in the last fiscal year – a substantial increase, of close to 70 percent, over the prior year. Total hospital net assets also increased.

Disparities

Forum Tackles High Cost Of Health Care, Need For Transparency

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What if you needed a hip replacement and could click through a list of area hospitals to compare costs and outcomes for the procedure? That kind of transparency of information might go a long way towards improving quality of care and lowering costs, a panel of experts suggested Monday at a forum on health care costs convened by the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut. “I look at the variance in some of the costs, when we’ve got three or four times the variance in cost for a hip (replacement), for the same hardware . . .

Disparities

Public Forum Will Delve Into High Costs Of Health Care

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With health care in the headlines, the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut is hosting a public forum Monday at Quinnipiac University’s North Haven campus that will feature a panel of experts weighing in on the high costs of health care. The forum, “Drowning in Health Care Costs: All Hands on Deck,” features prominent author Steven Brill, whose 36-page cover story in Time magazine in February 2013 delved into the arbitrary and largely hidden system of hospital pricing. Brill will be joined by Patrick Charmel, president and CEO of Griffin Hospital in Derby, and Kevin Lembo, state comptroller. Journalist Susan Campbell, a contributor to the Connecticut Health I-Team, will moderate the discussion. The event is the first in a series of forums planned by the foundation and its parent organization, the Connecticut Health Advancement and Research Trust (CHART), to discuss health care challenges facing the state.

Fines & Sanctions

Connecticut Pilots Patient Safety Program For Nursing Homes

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In the 1970s, after investigators reported that more than 70 percent of air crashes involved human error, the aviation community worked with psychologists to develop a training protocol to improve teamwork, decision-making and safety. Since then, that core training has been adapted for use in other professions, including the military, firefighting and medicine. Now, health professionals in Connecticut have taken those basic lessons and drafted a training protocol for yet another high-risk setting: Nursing homes. The authors of the program, called TeamSTEPPS for Long-Term Care, say the simple training can save lives and money. They plan to pilot the program in Connecticut in the fall and promote it nationally.

Disparities

‘Communities of Care’ Model Saves $5 Million In Hospital Costs

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Connecticut has saved an estimated $5.4 million in Medicare costs since 2010 by reducing re-hospitalizations of patients through a collaborative “communities of care” model in place in 14 regions around the state, including Hartford, New Haven, Milford, Meriden and Torrington. The estimate by Qualidigm, the state’s Medicare quality improvement organization, coincides with a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that showed a marked decrease in both hospitalizations and readmissions of Medicare patients in regions where quality improvement organizations (QIOs) coordinate interventions that engage community partners to improve care after discharge. Hospital clinicians and their community partners in the 14 regions of Connecticut have stepped up “to find solutions (so that) patients are benefitting from enhanced coordination among providers across the care continuum,” said Dr. Mary Cooper, vice president and chief quality officer of the Connecticut Hospital Association, which is working with Qualidigm on the “communities of care” model. Readmitting Medicare patients to the hospital within a month of discharge is a frequent—and expensive — occurrence. A new report published this week by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shows that hospitals and their community allies made little progress from 2008 to 2010 at reducing readmissions for elderly patients.

Fines & Sanctions

State Hospitals Face 2nd Highest Rate Of Federal Penalties Nationwide

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Connecticut fared second-worst in the country in the percentage of hospitals hit with federal penalties for selected quality-of-care measures and in the overall rate of loss of Medicare reimbursements associated with those penalties, new federal data shows. Eighty-six percent of the state’s 30 acute-care hospitals were penalized under Medicare’s Value-Based Purchasing Program, an incentive program created under the Affordable Care Act to reward hospitals on a number of quality measures related to treatment of patients with heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and certain surgical issues, as well as patient satisfaction. Overall, the state’s hospitals lost .15 percent of their Medicare reimbursement, compared to a .02 percent average loss nationally, the data shows. In addition to the penalties on quality measures, 23 Connecticut hospitals lost Medicare funding because of high rates of readmitting patients within 30 days of a hospital stay. Four faced the maximum loss, a 1 percent reduction in funding: Griffin Hospital in Derby, the Hospital of St.