BILL ANALYSIS Ó SENATE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS Senator Ricardo Lara, Chair 2015 - 2016 Regular Session SB 275 (Hernandez) - Health facility data ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- |--------------------------------+--------------------------------| | | | |Version: February 19, 2015 |Policy Vote: HEALTH 7 - 0 | | | | |--------------------------------+--------------------------------| | | | |Urgency: No |Mandate: No | | | | |--------------------------------+--------------------------------| | | | |Hearing Date: April 20, 2015 |Consultant: Brendan McCarthy | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- This bill does not meet the criteria for referral to the Suspense File. Bill Summary: SB 275 would require the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development to adopt a regulation adding physician identifiers to existing reports regarding patient care that hospitals and surgical clinics are required to submit to the state. Fiscal Impact: One-time costs of about $100,000 to develop policies, adopt regulations, and make necessary changes to computer systems (California Health Data and Planning Fund). Background: Under current law, the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development requires hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to SB 275 (Hernandez) Page 1 of ? file reports on patient encounters or discharges. These reports include information on all inpatient visits to hospitals, all patient encounters in hospital emergency departments, and all patient encounters when a surgery procedure is performed. The required reports include 19 data elements, including information on the patient's diagnosis and clinical outcomes upon discharge. Current law allows the Office to add data elements to these required reports. To date the office has not added any additional data elements. Under current law, the required reports do not need to include identifying information on treating physicians and the Office has not added this data element to the reports. (There is a separately required report specific to coronary artery bypass graft surgery that hospitals must also file. Those reports are risk-adjusted, meaning that the clinical outcome data is adjusted to reflect the underlying condition of patients, so that accurate comparisons can be made between hospitals and physicians who treat more high-risk patients with those who treat lower-risk patients. Those reports include information identifying the treating physician.) Proposed Law: SB 275 would require the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development to adopt a regulation adding physician identifiers to existing reports regarding patient care that hospitals and surgical clinics are required to submit to the state. Related Legislation: SB 906 (Correa, Statutes of 2014) expanded an existing pilot program which allowed physicians at certain hospitals to perform percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty and stent placement, to allow physicians at all qualifying hospitals to do so. That bill included a requirement that the Office publish a risk-adjusted report on clinical outcomes from the authorized procedures. SB 830 (Galgiani, 2014) would have required the Office to include heart valve repair and replacement surgeries in the annual report on coronary artery bypass graft surgeries and to SB 275 (Hernandez) Page 2 of ? annually provide a risk-adjusted outcome reports for all percutaneous cardiac interventions. That bill was held on this committee's Suspense File. Staff Comments: Current law requires the Office to publish nine risk-adjusted outcome reports on medical procedures in several categories, on a specified schedule. Those reports are supposed to include physician identifiers, unless the Office determines it is not appropriate to include physician identifiers. To date, the Office has not published any of those studies (although the Office has generated other reports specifically required under other provisions of law). Of the 48 states that collect outcome data from hospitals, only California does not include physician identifiers in those reports. -- END --