Mission Statement:  Health Watch USA is an organization whose mission is to promote health care transparency, competition and patient advocacy.

Position Statements:

#1. To promote health care transparency, the public should have readily available to them in an easily discernible, reliable and comparable format.

• The incidence of never events as defined by Medicare and the national quality forum.

• The incidents of health care acquired infections at facilities.

#2. With the advent of healthcare integration, hospital governance and quality issues arise because of the loss of medical staff independence.  Hospital Boards thus take an active role in quality oversight.  Board members should be trained in patient advocacy and all boards should  have community members without a conflict of interest with the facility. 

#3. To promote competition, the Kentucky Certificate of Need should be revised:

• To assure the availability of providers in needed areas.

• To assure market forces are present in regions with for-profit monopolies.

#4. To promote patient advocacy, mechanisms need to be in place to assure proper nursing staffing of facilities and staffing levels should be readily available to the public. Staffing ratios if implemented should be minimum ratios and not mandatory upper limits.

#6. To promote patient advocacy, HW USA supports strong protection of healthcare whistleblowers.

#7. To promote patient advocacy, there must be protection for healthcare providers to discuss quality and cost information with patients and patient medical decision makers without fear of reprisals or sanctions from their employers.

#8. Consumers and state agencies, who pay for health care, should not be required to reimburse healthcare facilities for largely preventable adverse outcomes as defined by Medicare and National Quality Forum's Never Events.  

HW USA was an initiator and facilitator of this initiative on a national level with activities involving conference presentations, forming partnerships with patient advocacy organizations, and advocacy on Capital Hill.    This provision was signed into Federal law in the 2010 Healthcare Reform Bill by President Barack Obama on Tuesday, March 23, 2010.  Consumer Union played a major role in advancing and advocating for this legislation.  

On July 1, 2010 Kentucky Medicaid adopted regulators for the non-payment of never events and hospital acquired conditions.