Martin Makary
See the following -
AHIP Speakers: Soaring Drug Prices Reach Crisis Stage
On the same day that President Trump met with Democratic leaders to discuss controlling prescription drug costs, physician advocates and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) debated and vented about drug costs at the America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) National Health Policy Conference. "The system is broken right now," Marilyn Tavenner, AHIP's CEO and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said Wednesday...
- Login to post comments
Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?
Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.
- Login to post comments
Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, And What Can Be Done About It
...The following year, researchers shook the profession with an article in Health Affairs entitled “‘Global Trigger Tool’ Shows that Adverse Events in Hospitals May be Ten Times Greater than Previously Measured.” Dr. David Classen, who did the seminal research for global triggers, served as lead author of the study, which looked at three mid-size to large (ranging from 550 to 1,000 beds) teaching hospitals associated with medical schools in the West and Northwest that participated on the condition of anonymity...When different detection methods were applied, global triggers found over 90 percent of events, the government’s Patient Safety Indicators (based on discharge summaries) found 8.5 percent, and voluntary reporting disclosed only 2 percent (afraid of censure and malpractice, doctors and nurses seldom willingly self-accuse). Classen, et al. warned: “reliance on voluntary reporting and the Patient Safety Indicators could produce misleading conclusions about the current safety of care in the U.S. health-care system and misdirect efforts to improve patient safety.”...
Plug and Play Healthcare: Open Middleware and the Emergence of a Functional Interoperability Framework
“A middleware architecture has been shown to be the best technological solution for addressing the problem of EHR interoperability. The middleware platform facilitates the transparent, yet secure, access of patient health data, directly from the various databases where it is stored. A server-based middleware framework supporting access to the various patient health data stores allows for a scalable, unified and standardized platform for applications to be developed upon. The middleware architectural design has been successfully used to link data from multiple databases, irrespective to the database platform or where the database is located,” says Voltz. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Reducing Medical Errors with Improved Communication, EHR Use
EHR use can help prevent medical errors only when lines of communication are open and reliable. The revelation that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States sent unsettling reverberations through the healthcare industry last week, but the news is likely only the tip of the iceberg and much more must be done to address this growing health issue...
- Login to post comments
Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.
Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year. The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates.
- Login to post comments