Hospitals Did Not Capture Half Of Consumer Harm Events Among Medicare Beneficiaries

Hospitals failed to identify and report half of events likely to harm hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries, according to an analysis by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

For this analysis, the OIG traced harm events it identified in a 2022 report with the goals of examining whether those events were captured and understanding what happened in response. Staff did not consider many missed events to be harm (46%) or reported that it was not standard practice to capture them (16%). Improvement actions hospitals took in response to the harm events included . . .