Lee Memorial Health System losing $2.4M for safety incidents

LEE COUNTY, Fla.- Southwest Florida hospitals are not making the grade when it comes to your care, and now they are losing out on money.

Lee Memorial Hospital and Gulf Coast Medical Center had high rates of potentially avoidable infections, like blood clots and bed sores. Medicare is now lowering the 2016 payments to both hospitals by 1 percent.

A Lee Memorial spokesperson says the hospitals will lose $2.4 million, but would not specify how that will affect services in the future.

The Medicare penalty is part of the Affordable Care Act, meant to reduce hospital-acquired conditions, like infections, sepsis, hip fractures and other complications that could reoccur after treatment.

Lee Memorial Health System was also penalized in 2014, losing $2.9 million. Lee Memorial says since then, they have started clinical transformation projects to reduce those hospital-acquired conditions.

Spokesperson Mary Briggs gave an example of one of those projects, saying “A central line, you would need that for say blood or for like a cancer drug infusion. You might have to have that, but we are going to try really hard to get that line out as quick as possible so the opportunity for infection doesn’t present itself.”

Lee Memorial says they’ve showed a 45 percent improvement since starting the projects, and the goal is to reach 100 percent improvement.