Monthly Archives: November 2010

According to a study published in the most recent issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, patient safety has not improved since a landmark study ten years ago that put the number of patient deaths due to medical error at 98,000 annually in American hospitals. That landmark study, conducted by The Institute of Medicine, [...]

The blog KevinMD.com features a blog post about the story of Dr. Ring – whom we had previously blogged about here. Dr. Pho (aka KevinMD) claims that Dr. Ring’s story is getting such heavy media attention because it’s a rarity – a practitioner owning up to a medical error in a public manner. Dr. Pho [...]

In order to control the unsustainable increases in the cost of our health care, Americans are going to have to transform the doctor-based model of care. Our doctors are already, by a wide margin, the highest paid in the world. Doctors’ high pay is not some natural occurrence: the American Medical Association keeps a tight [...]

We’ve blogged a lot about how reforming the way that doctors and hospitals deal with medical errors requires a cultural transformation. Doctors need to stop regarding errors as signs of incompetence or intellectual weakness and need to adopt the ethos of engineering culture: mistakes are going to be made, so let’s be open and forthright [...]

As reported by the American Medical Association (hat tip Tyler Cowen), Massachusetts is poised to enact legislation sounding the death knell of fee-for-service medicine as soon as 2011. Fee-for-service medicine refers to the system of paying doctors according to the number of services that they perform rather than by some other metric. So, for example, [...]

It’s become a bit of a theme on this blog lately: celebrated thinkers whose expertise lies outside of medical malpractice law dive into the medical malpractice debate, show how little they know about the issues and ultimately prove that, in this day and age of specialization for everyone from lawyers to policy wonks, they are [...]