Hospitals miss 49% of patient harm events: HHS report – Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News

According to a July report from HHS’ Office of Inspector General, hospitals failed to capture 49% of patient harm events because staff either did not consider them harmful or were not required to disclose them.

The OIG established the first national rate of harm among hospitalized Medicare patients in a 2010 report, which found that more than 1 in 4 experienced harm, the report said. In 2012, the HHS branch said hospitals failed to identify 86% of harm events. 

In 2022, the OIG reported 25% of hospitalized Medicare patients experienced harm during their stays in October 2018, and 43% of these harms were preventable. 

For this study, the OIG traced 299 harm events among 770 Medicare patients discharged in October 2018. The harm occurred at 154 hospitals, which provided information for 266 of the 299 events. The OIG used this data to estimate a national rate of harm events among hospitalized Medicare patients. 

Four things to know:

1. Among the 49% of missed harm events in October 2018, hospital staff did not consider 46% to be patient harm — rather, they explained the events as known complications or side effects, the report found. For 16% of these events, it was not standard practice to report because they did not meet hospitals’ criteria. Several hospitals only required disclosure for harm events leading to serious injury or death. 

2. Hospitals said 20% of these missed harm events were difficult to distinguish from underlying disease, and 4% were attributed to post-discharge harm. Eight percent should have been captured, hospital staff said. 

3. Surgery- and procedure-related harm events accounted for 73% of missed harm events. Additionally, teaching hospitals missed 62% of harm, whereas non-teaching hospitals missed 46% — possibly due to a higher complexity of care, the report said. 

4. “[D]efinitions of harm events vary widely across hospitals,” the OIG said. “This means that a harm event reportable at one hospital may not be considered reportable in another hospital, which undermines reliable measurement of the extent of patient harm across hospitals.”