The Michigan Health & Hospital Association joins a growing list of hospital associations, states and payers who have adopted policies to stop billing patients for certain serious preventable errors ("never events") and hospital-acquired conditions. This follows on from Medicare's decision to cease payment from 2008, for specific hospital medical errors.

iHealthBeat: A patient’s registry system has been developed in Vermont to track and manage the chronic disease care and quality improvements.

The goal of the registry system (provided by DocSite) is to target patients with chronic conditions who might not be receiving appropriate care.

More on Press Release: Vermont To Use Patient Registry To Track Chronic Disease Care

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 ranks as the healthiest state based on 20 measures of wellness, according to a report released on Monday by the United Health Foundation as reported on KaiserNetwork.org. For the report, UHF and the American Public Health Association and Partnership for Prevention rated each state on measures of wellness, such as rates of obesity, infant mortality, cancer deaths and high school graduation.

The following is a summary of legislation by state regarding the disclosure by hospitals of their hospital infection rates.

Arkansas

Vermont's Attorney General released their prescription drug price comparison Web site (7/10), joining several other states already providing their residents with tools to compare prescription drug prices at pharmacies in their state.

AHA News reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has opened to all U.S. hospitals its Web-based network for tracking healthcare-associated infections. It said the National Healthcare Safety Network has been improved to meet the needs of states with mandatory reporting of HAIs, and that eight states (California, Colorado, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia) plan to use the network in implementing mandatory reporting. CDC said the secured network allows hospitals to analyze the data and share it within a facility or with the general public if desired.