Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

SUN EDITORIAL:

A good prescription

Legislature should support proposals to improve hospitals, patient care

Democrats in the Legislature last week outlined a series of bills that would provide a boost for health care in Nevada, notably requiring a much-needed dose of transparency.

As David McGrath Schwartz reported, the legislation is intended to protect consumers. One key provision would give the public access to data about preventable injuries and illnesses suffered at hospitals. Doing so should improve health care because the public would have an indication of how hospitals treat patients. Sen. Valerie Wiener, D-Las Vegas, said requiring the reporting of patient care data would allow “consumers to shop and compare hospitals” with data that are “apples to apples and oranges to oranges.”

The push by Democrats comes in response to the Las Vegas Sun’s series, “Do No Harm: Hospital Care in Las Vegas.” The newspaper’s analysis of 2.9 million hospital billing records revealed 3,689 preventable injuries, infections and surgical mistakes in Las Vegas hospitals in 2008 and 2009. The Sun reported on several cases in which patients were seriously injured, and in some cases died, because of mistakes that could have been prevented.

Although the hospital records had been collected by the state, they had not been disclosed, leaving the public in the dark about the performance of hospitals in the Las Vegas Valley. No one knew the extent of avoidable incidents in hospitals, much less at which hospitals they happened.

Sen. Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, said that by not mandating hospitals provide more information, the state is “requiring patients to play roulette with their health care.”

Efforts to require more transparency have faced strong opposition in the past by hospital officials, and that is a shame. As the Sun has reported, some major hospitals across the country have embraced transparency. Instead of hiding from their mistakes, they admit them and learn from them to get better. They see the data as indicators of how they are treating patients.

Since the Sun’s series, a few Las Vegas hospitals have pledged to provide more information, and the Nevada Hospital Association is creating a website of “sentinel events,” incidents in which a patient is harmed or injured.

Those are welcome steps, but the Legislature should still take action. The state, not the hospitals, should be the independent clearinghouse of information. As well, there is more to improving the quality of health care than just providing data, and the Democrats have proposed several other good ideas. For example:

• Medical facilities would be required to create safety checklists and update them annually. That is a sound practice that has been effective in other states because it requires hospitals to continue improving.

• The insurance commissioner would be able to hold open hearings on proposed hospital rate increases, which would provide consumers with more information about costs and shine a light on how rates are set.

• The insurance commissioner would set a “fair rate” when patients use out-of-network services in an emergency. That would cut down on the high billing costs incurred when someone is taken to a facility not “preferred” by their insurers.

These are all common-sense proposals, which would improve health care and help rein in costs, and they should garner bipartisan support in Carson City.

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