Medicare Published Report - Hospital patient safety under a spotlight - April 10 2011 Chicago Tribune

Hospital patient safety under a spotlight
(click headline for full article)

The information is the first hospital-specific patient safety data to be released nationally by Medicare. Published last week, it comes from a review of hospital bills submitted for elderly and disabled patients between October 2008 and June 2010.
All of Chicago's top medical centers appear on the list of hospitals with safety issues, to one extent or another. For instance, the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, the University of Chicago Medical Center and Rush University Medical Center all reported higher-than-average numbers of hospital-acquired bloodstream infections associated with catheters. Officials at each medical center questioned the government's method of counting infections while acknowledging mistakes in data they submitted to Medicare...