By Healthcare Facilities Today

Patient safety progress is "excruciatingly slow," mainly because hospitals lack incentive to improve care and performance measures often miss the mark, according to an article on the Forbes website.

Despite improvements in preventable hospital errors due to lower hospital infection rates and a cultural shift from individual to organization-wide responsibility, hospitals lack incentives to make patient care safer, Ashish K. Jha, M.D., a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, said in the article.

Hospital mortality rates don't have significant financial consequences, Jha said, and under the Affordable Care Act, individual pay-for-performance for doctors and nurses doesn't hold healthcare systems accountable.

"It's not on the top priority list for CEOs. It's not what keeps CEOs awake at night. And until we get CEOs losing sleep about unsafe care, we're not going to make a big dent in the failures of our healthcare system," Jha said.

In the article, Jha suggested Medicare use a more long-term approach, such as bundled payments tied to real quality measures over 90 days as opposed to 30 days. Hospitals must have a better understanding of post-acute and longer-term care, and be accountable for long-term patient outcomes, he said.

Read the article.