After originally proposing not to publish certain recent hospital performance data because it feared it might be skewed by COVID-19-related challenges, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has decided to go ahead and publish that data – but not to use it in Medicare payment calculations.

Under Medicare’s hospital-acquired condition program, hospitals are rated on their performance on ten safety indicators.  Regulators, however, feared that doing so based on hospital performance during the pandemic might penalize hospitals whose communities were especially hard hit by the pandemic.  Patient safety groups opposed CMS’s April proposal to withhold the data and the agency ultimately compromised, announcing this week that it would post the data in its star ratings on its Care Compare web site but not use that data to reduce payments to hospitals.

Some hospital groups continue to oppose publication of the data based on their concern that it does not reflect the COVID-related challenges some providers have faced over the past two-and-a-half years.

Learn more about CMS’s decision in the Fierce Healthcare article “Patient safety advocate cheers CMS’ reversal on quality reporting, but hospitals say the data are no good.”