Medicare inspectors must do a better job of tracking reports of serious mistakes in care at the nation’s hospitals, as well as of informing rating agencies of the errors, according to a report released today by the agency’s inspector general.
Hundreds of serious errors go unrecorded, the report found, because the inspectors who find problems at hospitals don’t tell the national agencies that accredit hospitals. That means that those hospitals continue to participate in Medicare and that they don’t learn from their mistakes, Inspector General Daniel Levinson wrote.
Also, Levinson wrote, no one tracks the effectiveness of policy changes or how the hospitals actually correct mistakes.