Managing Our Microbial Mark: What We Can Learn About Pay for Performance from Ebola's Arrival at Our Shores

Abstract

The narrative of Ebola’s arrival in the United States has been overwhelmed by our fear of a West African-style epidemic. The real story of Ebola’s arrival is about our healthcare system’s failure to identify, treat, and contain healthcare associated infections. Having long been willfully ignorant of the path of fatal infectious diseases through our healthcare facilities, this paper considers why our reimbursement and quality reporting systems made it easy for this to be so. West Africa’s challenges in controlling Ebola resonate with our own struggles to standardize, centralize, and enforce infection control procedures in American healthcare facilities.

Keywords: Ebola; MRSA; epidemics; healthcare-associated infection; infectious diseases; infection-control; drug-resistant bacteria; reimbursement; hospital-acquired condition; antimicrobial resistance

JEL Classification: I10, I12, I18, K23