Starting in 2007, CMS changed its Medicare payment policy to stop paying for reasonably preventable medical errors in hospitals. What are these errors called?

Starting in 2007, CMS changed its Medicare payment policy to stop paying for reasonably preventable medical errors in hospitals. What are these errors called?

• A. Never Events
• B. Sentinel Events
• C. Near Misses
• D. Critical Incidents

Answer: (A)

These are called never events. They refer to serious, preventable errors that should never occur in a hospital if safety systems are in place. The policy behind not paying for these errors is to create a financial incentive for hospitals to implement reliable safety checks and protocols to prevent them. Examples commonly cited include wrong-site surgery, wrong patient, wrong procedure, and leaving a foreign object inside a patient. Sentinel events describe serious incidents that require investigation but aren’t the specific payment-denial category, while near misses are mistakes that could have caused harm but were caught in time, so they aren’t the focus of this policy.

These are called never events. They refer to serious, preventable errors that should never occur in a hospital if safety systems are in place. The policy behind not paying for these errors is to create a financial incentive for hospitals to implement reliable safety checks and protocols to prevent them. Examples commonly cited include wrong-site surgery, wrong patient, wrong procedure, and leaving a foreign object inside a patient. Sentinel events describe serious incidents that require investigation but aren’t the specific payment-denial category, while near misses are mistakes that could have caused harm but were caught in time, so they aren’t the focus of this policy.