Hospital responses to new Medicare quality effort

Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania

P.J. Brennan, chief medical officer for the Penn health system, said the hospital's high rates of cuts and tears from medical treatments did not indicate injuries but were an expected part of doing procedures. He said hospital officials also looked into the hospital's high rates of blood clots after a commercial insurer noted them. The officials found that some patients had come into the hospital because they had those clots. Others, he said, probably were caused by the insertion of catheters, which can dislodge clots even when preventative actions are taken. He said some clots were avoidable since the patients hadn't received the complete dose of blood-thinning medicine. He added that the hospital has improved how it handles these cases.

Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals

Rachel Sorokin, chief patient safety and quality officer at Thomas Jefferson, said the high rates of blood clots noted by Medicare occurred among neurosurgery and spinal-surgery patients because the hospital makes a concerted effort to screen for them before the clots cause problems. "Our doctors feel very strongly that's good for patients," she said.

Hahnemann University Hospital

The hospital said its high rate of accidental cuts and tears was due to incorrectly translating patient charts into Medicare billing data. "Once we corrected the coding in these charts, this indicator was within the national average," the hospital said in a statement.

Temple University Hospital

Medicare's comparison among hospitals was "imperfect," the hospital said, but "despite these shortcomings, we are dedicated to ongoing improvement and attention to those areas that emerge as potential opportunities for improvement." Temple also said the Medicare data were based on billing records from October 2008 through June 2010, which didn't capture subsequent improvements.

Geisinger Medical Center

The hospital has put in place procedures to prevent errors during surgery, such as evidence-based checklists, and has seen its rates drop since the period covered by the data published by Hospital Compare, said John Bulger, chief quality officer at Geisinger. "We're perfectly fine with the way CMS does public reporting data," he said. "At Geisinger, we would never shy away from the number and say, 'We don't need to get better than this.' "

   - Jordan Rau