Stuff this week that caught my eye: Does medical tourism harm the natives? Are all those CT scans destroying more than our budgets? Are nocturnalists at risk for more than decubs? Will Medicare need to cut hospital payments to fuel P4P? Answers: yes, yes, probably, and duh. Yesterday, NPR’s All Things Considered described the dark [...]
Archive | November, 2007
Rapid Response Teams: Ready for Prime Time?
Last year, I (with Peter Pronovost) wrote the toughest paper of my life – one that critiqued the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 100,000 Lives Campaign. This is the healthcare equivalent of criticizing both Mother Teresa and your local food bank in a single sitting (you can also read Don Berwick and his team’s response here). [...]
Dennis Quaid’s Kids: Are VIPs Safer?
The Entertainment Blogosphere was atwitter yesterday with the story of actor Dennis Quaid’s twin newborns, who reportedly received a 1000-fold heparin overdose at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in La La Land. Cedars’ Chief Medical Officer Michael Langberg may win this year’s Oscar for fastest public apology – having learned the lesson from the 2003 Duke transplant [...]
The Surgical Hospitalist
In an article in this month’s Journal of the American College of Surgeons (with a companion cover piece in the ACS’s Bulletin), four of my surgical colleagues – and this internist, perhaps to add a “cognitive” spin – describe UCSF’s “surgical hospitalist” program. It is an impressive story. When Dr. John Maa and his friends [...]
Perioperative Beta Blockers, Redux
Earlier this week, I discussed the preliminary results of the POISE trial, the blockbuster that showed that perioperative beta blockers may cause more harm than good. I’ve asked my UCSF colleague Andy Auerbach, one of the nation’s experts on this intervention, to help us understand these truly surprising results. Andy’s comments follow: “The POISE trial [...]
Three Remarkable Articles Last Week
As I mentioned when we launched, this blog won’t be your destination for a weekly journal update (there are plenty of sites for that). But I will keep an eye on the literature and let you know when I see something remarkable. And then I’ll try to put it in context. Last week, there were [...]
When is a Medical Error a Crime?
The first commandment of the modern patient safety movement was “Thou Shalt Not Blame.” Old-Think: errors are screw-ups by “bad apples,” and can only be prevented by some combination of shaming and suing the doctor or nurse holding the smoking gun. New-Think: errors represent “system problems;” any attempt to assess blame will drive providers underground, [...]
The Shameless Commerce Division
Sorry, but today is the day for a tiny bit of Shameless Commerce – a quick plug for my new book, Understanding Patient Safety. I wouldn’t normally do this – I’m as brazenly promotional as anybody, mind you, but it does seem a bit cheesy – but then I saw Robert Reich promote his new [...]
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