No pay for no performance
No pay for no performance
In most industries you don’t get paid for rework. Ship a defective promise or perform a service in a shoddy manner and not only won’t you get paid to fix it, you might have to pay a penalty to the customer. Not so in the hospital business. For the most part, if hospitals do something wrong they not only get paid for the original service but also make even more from the follow-on treatment. That may change soon, at least a little, if CMS Administrator Mark McClellan has his way according to Modern Healthcare:
McClellan said he wants Medicare to stop reimbursing hospitals and physicians for procedures and services resulting in so-called "never events" -- serious medical errors such as wrong-site surgeries, mismatched blood infusions and preventable post-operative deaths.
It could be a start.