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:
Oregon expands their Hospital Comparison Web Site. Oregon officials have posted online the second year of data on hospital service costs, including cost information for 14 new procedures and conditions, the Portland Business Journal reports.

iHealthBeat: Kaiser Posts Quality Information About Oregon Clinics Online

Kaiser Permanente became the first Oregon health care provider to publish quality information about its outpatient medical offices.

The online report compares clinics on nine quality measures. Such measures include: child immunization rates, diabetic blood sugar control, and breast and cervical cancer screenings for women.

Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems (OAHHS) has adopted a uniform set of guidelines, in the form of a resolution, to ensure that no patient (or payer) will pay for hospital care related to an adverse event. This resolution establishes those uniform guidelines regarding payment for serious adverse events.

All 57 hospitals in Oregon have agreed to not seek payment for costs associated with serious medical errors if an internal investigation shows the event was preventable and under the hospital's control, according to a resolution by the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems’ board of trustees, reports Modern Healthcare.

The Oregonian reports an error by state officials incorrectly singled out three Oregon hospitals as having higher-than-average death rates among patients undergoing bilateral heart catheterization.

The data were corrected last week, leaving nine hospitals performing worse than expected. No hospitals were found to have better than expected survival rates.

iHealthBeat reports Oregon's hospital quality reporting Web site (Oregon Hospital Quality Indicators) incorrectly listed three hospitals as having higher-than-average death rates among patients undergoing bilateral heart catheterization. The error was corrected on Thursday.

A news item on KaiserNetwork.org looks at several states that have begun requiring hospitals to disclose prices paid for services - with three states being at the forefront of providing more information on hospital prices and how they can vary; including New Hampshire, Oregon and Massachusetts:

- New Hampshire is disclosing the median amount specific health plans pay hospitals or clinics for about 30 common procedures;

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

Arkansas

As previously blogged, the state of Oregon launched a Web site enabling consumers to compare the costs of 80 different procedures performed at the state's hospitals. FierceHealthcare today reports that Oregon's attempt at hospital pricing transparency reveals much variation among the fees paid by insurance companies to pay hospitals for similar services.

The state of Oregon recently launched a Web site enabling consumers to compare the costs of 80 different procedures performed at the state's hospitals. Oregon joins New Hampshire and Pennsylvania in offering such cost reports.