Fri, Feb 22, 2008 (2:09 a.m.)

A lot has been written in the past several years about the rising number of hospital patients who are falling victim to preventable errors.

HealthGrades Inc., a Denver-based company that rates American hospitals and doctors, is among the entities that have documented this alarming trend.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine have verified the mounting statistics.

In a report released last year, HealthGrades said 247,662 potentially preventable deaths occurred in the nation’s hospitals from 2003 to 2005.

Hospital errors are as varied as they are numerous, but include leaving sponges or tools inside patients after surgeries, failure to properly sanitize rooms and equipment to prevent infections, improper handling of blood supplies and careless administration of medications.

The good news, reported this week by the Associated Press, is that hospitals across the country are aggressively acting to reduce errors. The wire service reported that hospitals are being innovative, employing everything from state-of-the-art room sanitizers to surgical sponges that sound an alarm if they are about to be left in a body.

The incentive to reduce errors springs from two sources: concern for the well-being of patients in light of the damning statistics and new Medicare rules.

Now being copied by state Medicaid administrators and private insurers, the rules prohibit payments to hospitals for extra treatment associated with many preventable errors.

The rules were written last summer after being authorized by a 2006 health care law. Fortunately, they clearly stipulate that patients cannot be billed “for any charges associated with the hospital-acquired complication.”

After the rules take effect Oct. 1, monitoring should be in place to ensure patients who contracted infections or complications while hospitalized are not slighted on care. It should be clear that hospitals must fully attend to these patients even while absorbing the whole cost.