if you've ever been admitted to a hospital and wondered about the incessant queries you might have received regarding your name, age and why you're there, consider that more of a blessing than an irritation.
Sometimes it's the only thing standing between you and a medical malpractice act that could cause you serious harm.
A so-called "never event" involving wrong-side surgery has once again come back to haunt a family. The recent botched operation further underscores the fact that, despite lip service being paid to patient safety and the advent of safety-enhancing assists such as surgery checklists and "timeouts," sheer preventable medical error continues to exist in hospitals across the country, with serious and sometimes deadly consequences.
In the recent case, which occurred in a surgery carried out in a St. Louis hospital to attend to a woman's brain injury, the surgical team somehow prepped and operated on the right side of the woman's brain, despite the left side having been clearly marked prior to surgery.
This blog has noted in past posts the advent of electronic health records (EHRs) in hospitals across the country. For several years now, and pushed hard by a government initiative that promises financial incentives for facility compliance, EHR systems have been steadily put into place in most hospitals and clinics across the United States.
The loud fanfare that accompanied their arrival has for some time now been appreciably muted, with legions of critics now readily noting the problems that come with the systems and, for many hospital staff members, seemingly wipe out the gains realized from the new technology.
It is uncontroverted that medical malpractice acts and omissions have resulted from use with EHR systems. Doctors and nurses sometimes do not enter critically important data, especially patient updates. Medical teams in different locales do not communicate well via the EHR interface. Medication errors are made. Users frequently complain about the difficulty associated with using the systems and software that is unresponsive, frustrating and error-prone.
The above headline -- or anything similar to it -- addressing the damage claims of and payouts to injured plaintiffs in medical malpractice cases is bound to get a divided reaction among diverse camps of readers.
On the one hand, people believing that medical professionals necessarily need to be held to a standard of care that promotes patients' interests and that truly seeks to do no harm endorse payouts to injured individuals and families that have suffered through medical incompetence. A widespread public view stresses that negligence and any clear divergence from competently practiced medicine needs to be identified and remedied. Not doing so rewards bad doctors and virtually ensures increased patient harm in the future.
A number of medical regulatory boards and agencies in states across the country, including Pennsylvania, have likely paid attention to actions taken recently in Maryland aimed at reducing incidents of medical malpractice and patient harm caused by loose licensing procedures and other shortcomings.
Many readers might reasonably believe that most instances of patient harm owing to medical error result from surgical mistakes or treatment glitches.
Although those causes are certainly common enough, researchers from Johns Hopkins Hospital who have sifted through decades of malpractice-related material say that they are easily eclipsed as catalysts directly leading to fatal and serious injury by something else, namely this: failure to diagnose a serious disease or illness.
There is one thing that jumps out in research conclusions concerning what medical interns do well and spend an inordinate amount of time doing each day at work: walking.
And although that might make them an occupational group that is comparatively fit compared to other professions, it also has downside implications for medical malpractice and medical error.
It's the people.
More than technology, facility infrastructure or any other factor, a study conducted by a large insurance company indicates that the employees themselves -- how they interact, how well they work together, the effectiveness of their professional communications, their forged workplace culture, or lack of all those things -- determine more than anything else the overall effectiveness of the patient care delivered by a medical facility.
Put another way: A strained workplace culture and professional interaction among medical staff members will absolutely contribute to a higher level of medical malpractice and patient harm.
There is truly a "wow" factor related to much about the medical industry. To many people, that increasingly has more to do these days with s sheer disconnect in logic than it does with improved health outcomes.
Consider, for example, the topic of "never events," something that this blog has alluded to in the past. In a nutshell, and despite both modern technology and constant calls for improvement, surgeons commit egregious medical malpractice acts such as operating on the wrong patient or body part multiple times in American hospitals each day.
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