Hospitals scramble to avoid bedsores under new Medicare rule

A Sept. 5 Wall Street Journal article reported that hospitals are scrambling to implement new programs to prevent pressure ulcers, commonly known as bedsores, as a result of Medicare's new policy to not pay for specific conditions when they are acquired during a hospital stay.

(Previous posts on the topic of Hospital Acquired Conditions can be found here and here.)

The article listed several hospitals that have implemented new measures as a result of the new Medicare rule, including:

• An audio system at OSF St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill., reminds staff to reposition patients every two hours to prevent pressure ulcers.
• Owensboro Medical Health System in Kentucky has spent $246,000 to increase its use of inflatable air mattresses to reduce the occurrence of pressure sores.

Hospitals state in the article that the new Medicare rule is unlikely to reduce costs:

"Critics of Medicare’s rules say unreimbursed costs pressure-ulcer treatment simply passed along in higher medical charges for everyone. But Medicare counters that the new policy will give hospitals strong incentive to screen patients who may be at risk.

According to the article:

• Nearly 60,000 deaths are reported each year due to hospital-acquired pressure ulcers.
• Last year there were 322,946 cases of pressure ulcers reported as a secondary diagnosis.
• The cost of treating a severe pressure ulcer with complications that require surgery can be as high as $70,000.
• Acute-care hospitals treat about 2.5 million pressure ulcers each year, and as many as 15 percent of hospitalized patient may have pressure ulcers at any one time, according to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.