U.S. hospitals Medicare punished for high hospital-acquired conditions FY 2015-2022

In FY2022, from the 3,124 hospitals Medicare assessed, 764 were penalized for high rates of hospital-acquired conditions (HAC). This is lower than the highest number to date of 800 hospitals recorded in 2019.
The hospital-acquired conditions reduction program (HACRP) was created as part of Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) payment and delivery system reform, to focus on quality rather than quantity of care. Hospitals are ranked by the rates of HACs such as infections, bed sores and post-operative blood clots. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services penalizes the lowest performing 25 percent of all hospitals each year one percent of their Medicare hospital payments. Critics have voiced that the program will always punish the lowest performing quartile regardless if they made any improvement from the previous year and that teaching hospitals, where infections are more rigorously tested for, are more often punished by the program. This statistic presents the number of hospitals in the United States that Medicare punished for high rates of hospital-acquired conditions from FY2015 to FY2022.