Safety First

Amid all the federal wrangling over national health insurance reform, many states in the Northeast and elsewhere are focusing on smaller, targeted efforts that affect property/casualty insurers as much or more than health insurers: patient safety.

Much of these reforms have to do with overhauling the degree that health care consumers can evaluate their doctors and other care providers, a move that many feel will help ultimately lower costs for everyone.

Consumers in New Jersey, for instance, now have access to detailed information on patient safety at hospitals throughout the Garden State, thanks to a newly released report by state health officials that provides detailed data on patient safety performance and incidence of serious medical errors at every hospital in the state.

These tragic and costly errors include such mistakes as operating on the wrong body part, or leaving a sponge or instrument inside a patient’s body.

The new information is far broader than safety data previously available in New Jersey, and comes courtesy of a law change this summer that called for its inclusion in the annual publication of the New Jersey Hospital Performance Report. (Check it out at www.nj.gov/health/hpr.)

That same law also bars hospitals from charging insurers or patients to correct medical mistakes – a move that other states have also made.

A key issue in the debate over health care reform is the cost of medical malpractice insurance, an expense driven largely by the severity and frequency of errors in hospitals and doctors’ offices. And it’s a problem that still remains very much in the public eye.

Just last month, surgeons at Rhode Island Hospital mistakenly operated on the wrong part of a patient’s hand – the fifth time the hospital has performed a so-called wrong-site surgery since 2007. (See story on page 11.) Three of those previous errors involved surgery to the wrong sides of patients’ heads.

Increasing transparency for hospital and doctors is not a new strategy for states trying to increase patient safety. Massachusetts, for instance, included increased availability of safety data when it enacted its own version of health care reform two years ago.

It’s something that federal regulators, Congressmen, Senators and others have increasingly called for in recent years as a mechanism to help rein in fast-growing health care costs, as well as decrease the frequency of errors.

Part of it is the shame factor. When health care executives know the public is more closely watching their mistakes, they’re more likely to take extra steps to institute procedures and safeguards to assure their operating rooms, examinations and services are as safe as possible. Not that they don’t already, but transparency of mistakes gives an added level of importance.

“Knowledge is key,” said New Jersey Assemblyman Herb Conaway (D-Delanco), a doctor and sponsor of the increased safety data disclosure measure in the Garden State. “That’s what this report gives the public – knowledge about how each hospital is doing when it comes to patient safety. Gathering and analyzing data is the first step in developing system-wide processes to reduce errors as much as possible.”

For insurers – which make money when everyone does their jobs safely and effectively – that’s ultimately the goal.

Topics New Jersey