Monthly Archives: January 2011

Republicans can’t wrap their heads around the idea that sometimes the most efficient markets are not the freest ones, and so they don’t really have any positive proposals for what to do about our health care mess. They don’t, for example, have any proposals for what to do about the fifty percent of Americans who [...]

If there’s one theme that this blog has hammered away at relentlessly, it’s the importance of checklists in improving patient safety. In a massive World Health Organization study, checklists were shown to reduce surgical deaths by forty-seven percent and major complications by thirty-six percent. Yet only one-quarter of American hospitals are using checklists. Now comes [...]

As reported by Liz Kowalczyk of the Boston Globe, Massachusetts has become the first state in the nation to post online all payments that drug and medical device companies make to the state’s health care providers. You can use the database for yourself by clicking here. For years, Minnesota has published similar information regarding its [...]

Over the past four months, orthopedic surgeons at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have committed the same surgical error three different times – by operating on the wrong vertebra of patients undergoing back surgery. According to recent news stories about the errors, two of the “wrong site” surgical errors were uncovered only after patients complaining [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the divergent approaches that we have taken to addressing the public health problems of medical malpractice and auto accidents. We seem to have taken a “hands off” approach to medical malpractice (even though it kills 100,000 people a year), going so far as to enact “tort reform” [...]

If you had to guess what hospitals, over the period of 2004-2008, billed Medicare for the most spinal fusion surgeries what hospitals would you name? Number one on the list – Johns Hopkins – probably would not surprise you. It’s a massive teaching hospital and one of the finest hospitals in the country. Number two [...]