VT hospitals will stop billing for "never events"

Vermont's hospital trade group, the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, has become the third such state group to officially declare that its members won't bill patients or insurance companies for a core set of adverse events. The association has agreed not to bill for eight serious events, drawn from a list of 28 "never events" developed by the National Quality Forum. Vermont hospitals now won't bill for air embolism-associated injury, artificial insemination/wrong donor, incompatible blood-associated injury, med error injury, retention of foreign objects within a patient, wrong-patient and wrong-site surgery and wrong surgical procedure.

The Minnesota and Massachusetts hospital associations have already taken similar stands, though neither have implemented such a policy yet. Meanwhile, the Colorado and Michigan hospital trade groups are considering similar policies as well.

To find out more about the Vermont hospitals' policy:
- read this Modern Healthcare piece (reg. req.)

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