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The public could soon get a look at confidential reports about errors, mishaps and mix-ups in the nation's hospitals that put patients' health and safety at risk, under a groundbreaking proposal from federal health officials. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wants to require that private health care accreditors publicly detail problems they find during inspections of hospitals and other medical facilities, as well as the steps being taken to fix them. Nearly nine in 10 hospitals are directly overseen by those accreditors, not the government.
There's increasing concern among regulators that private accreditors aren't picking up on serious problems at health facilities. Every year, CMS takes a sample of hospitals and other health care facilities accredited by private organizations and does its own inspections to validate the work of the groups. In a 2016 report, CMS noted that its review found that accrediting organizations often missed serious deficiencies found soon after by state inspectors.
[...] The move follows steps CMS took several years ago to post government inspection reports online for nursing homes and some hospitals. ProPublica has created a tool, Nursing Home Inspect, to allow people to more easily search through the nursing home deficiency reports; the Association of Health Care Journalists has done the same for hospital violations.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Scrutinizer on Saturday April 22 2017, @01:53PM (5 children)
I'd heard a saying a while back: "hospitals are where one goes to die." I thought it was a somewhat strange and silly statement at the time. Come to find out that medical clinics and staff aren't gods walking among men in marble temples: medical mistakes kill approximately 225,000 Americans [mercola.com] per year [cnn.com].
"Practicing medicine" makes more sense now.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday April 22 2017, @02:40PM (3 children)
People who have read my other comments on previous stories will know that I'm an outspoken critic of bad medical practice. But even I have to express skepticism at the headlines last year about the "third leading cause of death" as medical errors. (And, regarding the first link, I wouldn't ever take anything on Joe Mercola's website as reliable without another source.)
Expert reactions to that "study" pointed out a number of major issues -- first, it wasn't actually new data. It was an average based on estimates from three previous studies. The definition of what constituted a "medical error" wasn't well-defined and likely included deaths that were not reasonably preventable given what was known at the time. This article [statnews.com] reviews some of those issues (though I disagree with the author's somewhat bizarre recommendation of using "years of life lost" instead of deaths as the better statistic).
Perhaps even more shockingly, this blog post [blogspot.com] claims to have actually looked at the studies that meta-study was based on, and well...
... Dr. Martin Makary, who claims that 251,454 patients die from medical error every year. Makary's review extrapolated that figure from three papers published before 2009 which had a combined 35 supposedly preventable deaths. That's not a typo—35 deaths in all. One of the papers stated that all 9 deaths in three tertiary care hospitals were preventable. In his BMJ paper, Makary says, "some argue that all iatrogenic deaths are preventable."
I haven't looked up the original studies myself, but a PDF of the actual paper [west-info.eu] which claimed 250,000 deaths/year seems to be available if someone else wants to check the citations and see if that blog is true. Given the crap I've seen in meta-analysis studies before, it would not surprise me at all to find out that a meta-analysis was making huge claims based on very little actual legitimate data.
Obviously I do NOT mean to downplay the horror of deaths caused by medical error. But we shouldn't necessary believe every sensationalist headline we see about them either.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday April 22 2017, @03:13PM
Just found this analysis [sciencebasedmedicine.org] of the meta-study. The author makes it clear that he's expressing his own opinion, but it contains liberal quotes and information about the various studies on medical error. He stops short of giving his own estimate, but it sounds like he's guessing it's likely an order of magnitude lower than many of these popular estimates. (Another response article [theguardian.com] in the BMJ gave a similar estimate of about 10%.)
But, as he says repeatedly, even if the number of deaths caused by medical error is "only" 20,000-25,000/year, that's way too much.
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Saturday April 22 2017, @08:47PM
Here are a few more sources:
Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States [washingtonpost.com]
How Many Die From Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals? [propublica.org]
Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US [bmj.com]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday April 22 2017, @09:41PM
Having worked at an EHR (electronic health records) company, I'm surprised that the number of deaths due to human errors isn't a magnitude higher. Even if there's no consensus on what the actual numbers are, I strongly believe that mistakes are a leading cause of death.
(Fun fact, one large EHR provider would set up a system at one hospital, set up a system at another hospital, and those two systems could not talk to one another because each installation is a unique pile of hacks. Standardization? What's that?)
People make mistakes. Sleep-deprived, stressed doctors will make more mistakes. Bad handwriting causes more mistakes. Lack of time with each patient causes misunderstandings. Relatively educated doctors interacting with uneducated common folk causes misunderstandings. Hospitals are filled with antibiotic resistant pathogens. Modern US hospitals are an absolute clusterfuck.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @02:53PM
Hospitals are no place to get better. Has been known for a long time, for example these blues lyrics --
No sugar for my coffee, no flour for my bread,
Red Cross store wen't help me fix my ailing head.
I was on the floor a bleendin' I almost cought my death,
No Red Cross store gonna save my life when I'm down to my last breath.
Well I ain't goin' back to that Red Cross store no more.
Lord I ain't goin' back to that Red Cross store no more.
When searching for the lyrics, Google found this thread about problems at the American Red Cross,
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/06/16/1830211 [soylentnews.org]