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In its toughest crackdown yet on medical errors, the federal government is cutting payments to 721 hospitals for having high rates of infections and other patient injuries, records released Thursday show. Medicare assessed these new penalties against some of the most renowned hospitals in the nation, including the Cleveland Clinic, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. (Rau, 12/18)

More than 700 hospitals will see their total Medicare payments docked by 1% in fiscal 2015 as part of the first year of a federal penalty program aimed at reducing preventable harm and improving patient safety. (McKinney, 12/18)

More than 257,000 U.S. doctors will see their Medicare payments cut by 1% next year because they didn’t meet federal goals for using electronic medical records, said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Some 28,000 providers will be docked another 1% of Medicare pay for not prescribing medications electronically. About 200 hospitals were informed in October that they also will lose 1% of their Medicare payments in 2015 for missing a deadline for EMR use. The rules, part of the 2009 stimulus package, were designed to spur the health-care industry’s transition from paper files to electronic record keeping. (Beck, 12/18)

More hospitals will see a payment bump than a penalty in the coming year under Medicare's value-based purchasing program, according to newly released federal data for more than 3,000 U.S. facilities.A total of 1,698 hospitals will have their Medicare payments boosted in 2015, 467 more than in 2014, according to a Modern Healthcare analysis of data the CMS posted Wednesday. The posted adjustments, however, range between 0.01% and 2.09%, which suggests there could be some anomalies in the data. (Rice, McKinney and Evans, 12/18)