Monthly Archives: May 2011

“We train, hire and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.” – Dr. Atul Gawande The commencement speaker who addressed this year’s graduating class at Harvard Medical should be a familiar figure to readers of this blog. It was one of the blog’s heroes – Dr. Atul Gawande – he of [...]

According to a May 16 article in the Boston Business Journal, despite the stellar reputation of many of Massachusetts’ hospitals, you don’t want to be a Medicare patient in a hospital here. We have nearly a half-dozen medical schools in the Commonwealth, as well as some of the world’s best hospitals, but all of our [...]

Laser spine surgery centers. You’ve probably seen their pay-per-click ads on google (they advertise a lot through pay-per-click). Do they offer a new, better kind of therapy or is it all snake oil? According to a recent Bloomberg news story, the surgeries at laser spine surgery centers are more expensive and less safe than traditional [...]

The tragic case of Phoebe Prince, the Northampton, MA teenager bullied into committing suicide, earned national attention and shone a spotlight on schoolyard bullying. It led to criminal charges against the bullies and, last week, the last of the accused teens entered into a plea deal. None of the teens will be going to jail [...]

My last blog post was on how breakdowns in communication between doctors and nurses are the main source of medical malpractice in the Emergency Room. Why are their problems in doctor-nurse communications? The white paper mentioned in my last post lays the blame at the feet of technology: nurses input data into computer systems and [...]

As the Harvard philosopher George Santayana famously remarked, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Now Crico/RMF, the insurance company which provides medical malpractice coverage for Harvard-affiliated hospitals, is attempting to learn from past medical mistakes to avoid repeating them. The results are a white paper on emergency room medical malpractice [...]