WSJ: The Informed Patient: Hospitals Admitting Errors is a small step towards better quality, cost, and access…
Posted by steven_spear | Under Innovation, health care, high velocity organizations, process excellence Friday Aug 28, 2009Laura Landro, writing the “Informed Patient” column at the Wall Street Journal, explains that hospitals are admitting when a patient is grievously harmed. (”Hospitals Owning Up to Errors,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2009). This is good news, but if it ends there, greater opportunities are lost.
Complications occur with staggering frequency. Very few hospitals identify and investigate small as well as large ones immediately–not on a delay, to find the root causes of inefficiency and ineffectiveness that compromise affordability and quality. Some have achieved near perfection in eliminating patient harm as an occurrence.
Until all hospitals do the same to improve, public transparency about ill events–large and small–should be required. Now, patients largely source care blindly, inadvertently trusting institutions too often that are dangerous and too infrequently to those that are remarkably safe. With informed choice, average quality would be driven higher and average cost progressively lower.
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- Breaking the Tradeoff Paradigm Among Quality, Safety, and Cost
- Incident Reporting Systems: Inadequate tool for quality and safety…
If you think that some hospitals have achieved near perfection in eliminating patient harm as an occurrence, I have a few studies to show you. Adverse events in medicine are reported only 1.5% of the time. Looking at the record created by the health care professionals who don’t report makes them look perfect. But they are not. See: http://patient-safety.com/Medical.Reporting.htm
Requiring public transparency from people who won’t report the problems in the first place isn’t likely to result in anything substantive.
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