New C. diff, MRSA data posted on CMS Hospital Compare site

January 12th, 2015

New data posted on the Hospital Compare website of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) allows patients to see how their local hospitals are doing in preventing Clostridium difficile and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bloodstream infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

The data on health care associated infections (HAIs) and other performance measures were first reported to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) as part of the CMS Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) program.

Under the IQR program, hospitals have a financial incentive to report the quality of their inpatient services by tying the reporting of designated quality measure data to their ability to be paid the full amount of the annual update to the Medicare inpatient payment rate. The HAI data and other quality information is then publically available on the CMS Hospital Compare website.

For full details on this story see the January 2014 issue of Hospital Infection Control & Prevention