Dive Brief:
- Bacterial infections are increasingly resulting in serious complications for U.S. hospital patients, costing Medicare billions each year, according to the latest data from CMS.
- Sepsis was responsible for a total of about $7.2 billion of Medicare's payments to hospitals in 2013—an increase of 9.5% from the year before.
- Severe sepsis with a major complication was disturbingly prevalent: In fact, it was the second-most commonly-billed diagnosis that hospitals submitted to Medicare in 2013, with more than 398,000 reported cases.
Dive Insight:
Between 2000 and 2009, recorded cases of sepsis nearly doubled, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department reports. Part of that was due to higher numbers of at-risk patients, like the elderly, but some of the increase was a result of better diagnoses and coding for the disease, Eric Adkins at Ohio State University told Bloomberg Business.
Severe sepsis requiring mechanical ventilation was the most expensive diagnosis shown in the Medicare data, with the average charge being $170,000. For severe sepsis with major complications but no mechanical ventilation, hospitals billed an average of $52,000.
The Medicare data shows that the largest number of bills for sepsis came from Montefiore Medical Center in New York, with 941 cases. It was followed by Memorial Hermann Hospital System in Texas, with 891 cases, and then New York Hospital Medical Center with 857 cases.
Want to read more? You may enjoy this article about the two charts that explain the Medicare data release of hospital charges.