Important bill could help ensure NJ’s hospitals are safe

Source: AARP.org |

How safe is your local hospital?

Soon, we all may be able to answer this vital question.  Legislation providing for the public reporting of certain patient safety indicators will allow us all to see just how well our hospitals measure up.

Most importantly, the legislation will reduce the societal cost of medical errors by extending payment policies used by Medicare to all health-care payers in New Jersey, even the uninsured.  When patients require additional surgery and a longer hospital stay as a result of an error, they should not have to pay doctors and hospitals for the added medical costs.  This legislation will reduce and in some cases eliminate payment for medical errors.  In every complex system, errors can occur—health care is not an exception.  Medical errors add considerable costs to the health-care system.  According to the Institute of Medicine, medical errors are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States.  One study estimates that medical errors account for 2.4 million extra hospital days and $9.3 billion in excess charges.

Some of these medical errors are minor in scope and consequences, and some of them are caught and corrected before a patient even knows that they occurred.  But in some cases, "never events" – an industry term for medical errors that are clearly identifiable, preventable, and carry serious consequences – happen.  And in these cases, New Jersey has a responsibility to do everything it can to reduce the number of "never events" and ensure a safe health-care environment for the state's health-care consumers.

New Jersey first began addressing this issue in 2004, with passage of the Patient Safety Act, which Sen. Joseph Vitale sponsored.  The law established a new, nonpunitive and confidential medical error reporting system to track "never events" and ensure that patient safety policies are put in place to make sure they never happen again.

Through the Patient Safety Act, serious errors are required to be reported to the Department of Health and Senior Services, along with the facility's Patient Safety Committee analysis.  Health-care workers may also anonymously report near misses or errors that are not otherwise subject to mandatory reporting.

The number of errors reported to the state has increased each year since the Patient Safety Act was passed, which is a testament to its success.  The state collects the data, analyzes it and identifies systemwide changes that can be made at all New Jersey hospitals in order to prevent errors and achieve better health outcomes.

However, while all these efforts to improve patient safety happen behind the scenes, the AARP New Jersey rightfully raised the issue that citizens still do not have the information they need to answer the question posed from the start:  How safe are their local hospitals?

Senate bill S2471 is the result of AARP New Jersey's advocacy efforts and the collaborative work of the Department of Health and Senior Services, the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, Sen. Vitale's colleagues in the Legislature, and other stakeholders.  Balancing the right to know of individual patients with the collective public benefit of confidential reporting is delicate, but is achieved with this legislation.

Passage of S2471 and its Assembly counterpart, A3633, will make the New Jersey Hospital Performance Report Card an even more useful tool for patients as they decide which health-care facility they may choose.  Consumers have the right to know about the safety and quality of their local hospitals in comparison to others throughout the state.

Opening the books to health-care consumers to see how patient safety efforts in their hospitals measure up and establishing a comprehensive nonpayment plan for medical errors simply make sense.

We ask key stakeholders and elected officials to support the bill, which will help make New Jersey hospitals among the safest in the nation.
Joseph F. Vitale, D-Woodbridge and Sy Larson, AARP New Jersey state president.

AARP urges its members to call 1 800 844 2272 and ask their state assembly member to vote for A3633, a bill that will undoubtedly help improve health care transparency in the Garden State!