Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, has become the third such state group to officially declare that its members won't bill patients or insurance companies for a core set of adverse events, reports Fierce Healthcare. The association has agreed not to bill for eight serious events, drawn from a list of 28 "never events" developed by the National Quality Forum. Vermont hospitals now won't bill for air embolism-associated injury, artificial insemination/wrong donor, incompatible blood-associated injury, med error injury, retention of foreign objects within a patient, wrong-patient and wrong-site surgery and wrong surgical procedure.

The Minnesota and Massachusetts hospital associations have already taken similar stands, though neither have implemented such a policy yet. Meanwhile, the Colorado and Michigan hospital trade groups are considering similar policies as well.