Here’s How The VA Manipulates Stats To Make Hospitals Look Good

DC: A surgeon who worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for decades is alleging that hospital administrators across the country are manipulating statistics on patient mortality rates to increase facility ratings and gain bonuses.

Dr. Michael Mann, a professor of surgery and director of the Cardiothoracic Translational Research Lab at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in a wide-ranging interview that he felt compelled to write a book published earlier this year called “Mission Betrayed” on the systemic problems at the VA after he was terminated from the San Francisco VA system in 2011. This termination, Mann says, occurred after he started questioning policies prohibiting surgeries on high-risk patients.

These systemic problems revolve around a system called the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP), which compares patient mortality rates across VA hospitals in the U.S. According to Mann, hospital administrators frequently deny surgery for high-risk patients in order to improve VA mortality statistics. Those statistics are then used to justify bonuses at the local level for those same administrators.  MORE