The Bangor Daily News published a thoughtful and courageous article authored by Dr. Philip Caper concerning the reasons why healthcare in this country is in the state it's in right now. The article was entitled, "The Ills of Money-Driven Medicine" and squarely lays the blame for the healthcare mess on the increasing focus on profit margins in the practice of medicine.
Dr. Caper recently attended "Avoiding Avoidable Care" a conference on the state of the healthcare profession. Here's an excerpt from the article, "We spent two days discussing the reasons for and ethics of unnecessary medical care in the U.S. Instead of blaming others (such as patients or malpractice lawyers), the doctors at this conference mostly agreed that “If you’re looking for an explanation for medical care overuse — too many tests, procedures and prescriptions — follow the money.”
The amount of overuse was estimated to be around 30 percent of all medical care. We spend $2.7 trillion annually on medical care in the U.S. Thirty percent of a big number is still a big number, about $800 billion in this case. In our industrialized health care system, moving “product” is important, whether or not it is really necessary."
While medical errors remain a persistent problem generally, the instances of medical errors involving Medicare patients is simply alarming. The Office of the Inspector General of the Health and Human Services has reported that only 1 in 7 medical errors are actually reported. Additionally, HHS found that 130,000 Medicare patients experience an "adverse event" in a hospital setting each month.
Now, some will argue that the under reporting stems from medical professionals' fear of medical malpractice lawsuits, a recent NY Times article exposed this as untrue. Daniel R. Levinson, Inspector General of the Health and Human Services Department concluded that medical errors concerning Medicare patients results far more often from a)lack of understanding of what constitutes patient harm, b)these harmful events should be reported, and c)assuming others will report the issue.
In other words, the lack of reporting is an issue of education and complacency. All medical personnel should be taught about the effects of medical errors, especially for the Medicare population. Secondly, these same healthcare workers must be shaken from their complacency in treating an "adverse event" as "no big deal". Patient safety and concern for a fellow human being must be paramount. It's apparent from these findings that that is not the case.
A recent study of hospitals in Canada concluded that 10-15% of all prescriptions contain errors. These errors can be serious, sometimes fatal. The study also found that 25% of all preventable medical errors originated with a drug error. There are many factors that contribute to this pervasive and persistent problem. One of the more preventable and fixable issues concerns the illegible handwriting that contributes to prescription drug errors. There are solutions to this problem-electronic processing of drugs and prescriptions.
According to those who've studied the issue, "Researchers say that the health care systems of Canada and the U.S. have the least developed information technology for patient record-keeping, prescriptions and other medical tasks. According to Dr. Richard Alvarez, the most significant barrier for electronic record-keeping is not financial costs, but rather the traditional work habits of medical professionals.
Some medical professionals are embracing Dr. Alvarez's efforts to reduce prescription drug errors. By computerizing the process, mistakes caused by poor handwriting, abbreviations and dosage errors could decrease substantially. Computer software could require doctors to double-check orders. A pharmacy would receive a computer printout of prescription information rather than an illegible note. Errors could still happen in manual entry of data, but in far fewer numbers."
As technology evolves, so too does jurisprudence regarding the proper use of such tools as social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter. Recently, the Massachusetts Appeals Court has reminded judges that they must remind jurors that they should refrain from posting comments about ongoing jury trials to Facebook and Twitter. The consequences for not following this directive are serious-a potential mistrial.
“Jurors must separate and insulate their jury service from their digital lives,’’ the court said in a ruling involving a Plymouth Superior Court case in which several jurors made comments on Facebook during a trial. Those posts in turn elicited responding posts from friends.
“Instructions not to talk or chat about the case should expressly extend to electronic communications and social media,’’ the court added in its little-noticed ruling two weeks ago.
