Kennedy goads HHS to move ahead with safety monitoring

Coming soon: A new set of HHS-created organizations which will keep a closer eye on providers. That is, unless HHS continues to drag its feet in implementing an existing law requiring it to do just that.

If Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) gets his way, HHS will soon create patient-safety organizations which will collect and organize adverse-event data collected from providers. The organizations' job will be to find the causes of adverse events and help cut down on errors.

Kennedy has asked HHS to create a timetable for creating the regs governing the new patient safety organizations, but they haven't shared one with the Senator. Bureaucracy, or is there more to the delay? I know there's still a lot of static out there regarding which quality measures to choose, but I would have thought this would be fairly routine given that the data won't be published publicly.

To learn more about the pending regs:
- read this Modern Healthcare piece

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