Hospital-Acquired Conditions (Present on Admission Indicator)

On February 8, 2006, the President signed the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2005. Section 5001(c) of DRA requires the Secretary to identify conditions that are: (a) high cost or high volume or both, (b) result in the assignment of a case to a DRG that has a higher payment when present as a secondary diagnosis, and (c) could reasonably have been prevented through the application of evidence-based guidelines. Section 5001(c) provides that CMS can revise the list of conditions from time to time, as long as it contains at least two conditions. The statute is available in the Statute/Regulations/Program Instructions section, accessible through the navigation menu at left.

For discharges occurring on or after October 1, 2008, hospitals will not receive additional payment for cases in which one of the selected conditions was not present on admission. That is, the case would be paid as though the secondary diagnosis were not present. An example of how the HAC provision may affect an MS-DRG payment, beginning October 1, 2008, is presented below.

CMS also required hospitals to report present on admission information for both primary and secondary diagnoses when submitting claims for discharges on or after October 1, 2007.