By PAUL LEVY

Dear Mrs. Smith, I am writing to inform you that we exposed your body to an unnecessary level of radiation during your visit to our hospital. Oh, by the way, that was two years ago. We don’t intend to do anything about this for you. Also, we have known about this problem for a long time, and we don’t expect to change our procedures for future patients. Just wanted you to know. Yours in delivering the best health care in the world, Chief of Radiology and CEO. (Jointly signed.)

That’s the essence of this article by Walt Bogdanich and Jo Craven McGinty in the New York Times. Here are excerpts:

Long after questions were first raised about the overuse of powerful CT scans, hundreds of hospitals across the country needlessly exposed patients to radiation by scanning their chests twice on the same day, according to federal records and interviews with researchers.

Double scans expose patients to extra radiation while heaping millions of dollars in extra costs on an already overburdened Medicare program. A single CT scan of the chest is equal to about 350 standard chest X-rays, so two scans are twice that amount.

The pattern was evident in numbers for 2008, and the practice persisted in 2009. Here is a map that you can use to check out your own hospital. Just insert your zip code.

This is transparency at work, right? No. This is transparency that is failing.

The big problem is that the numbers are not current. If numbers are not produced in real time, it permits practitioners to say, “Those are old numbers. We are doing much better now.” That is just a psychological fact of life.

Here’s a quote from another article two weeks ago:

[The government] information reported needs to be a lot more up to date, said Carolyn Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. “We’re not so good at timely transparency,” she said. “We must get to a place where we get data in something like real time.”

Why is it that CMS, the Medicare agency, can’t produce numbers in real time and post them for the world to see on a map like that published today? All Medicare billing is done electronically. All CT scans have a billing code. I know a freshman at MIT who could write the algorithm to extract these figures. You don’t have to wait till a calendar year is over to start compiling numbers.

Isn’t it a matter of public health and medical ethics to publish this kind of data as soon as it is collected? By the way, this is not just a question for Medicare. Why don’t private insurers also publish such figures? What doesn’t each state Medicaid office?

In Massachusetts, the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy now collects an all payer claims data base. Why doesn’t it publish these numbers or allow researchers access to the data so they could do so? Why don’t the local media demand access to it to publish their own stories?

Paul Levy is the former President and CEO of Beth Israel Deconess Medical Center in Boston. For the past five years he blogged about his experiences in an online journal, Running a Hospital. He now writes as an advocate for patient-centered care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement at Not Running a Hospital.