Medical Practice – Page 9 – The Health Care Blog

Why Calculators Are the Future of Healthcare

Feb 7, 2010• 12

Thomas goetz

By THOMAS GOETZ

Want to know the future of medicine and healthcare in one sentence?

For my money, it goes like this: The real opportunity in healthcare is to combine our personal data with the huge amount of general biomedical and public health research, in order to create customized information that’s specific to our person and our circumstance. We need relevance, and the right information at the right time will help us make better choices for prevention, helping us stay healthier longer, it’ll help us navigate diagnosis, letting us select screening tests that are useful and not unnecessarily fearful, and it’ll let us make better decisions on care and treatment – when we’re trying to choose among various treatments to find our way back to health.

It’s in the last category – care and treatment – that I wrote a recent post at the Huffington Post about one man’s story with prostate cancer. Tom Neville got a diagnosis and then had to struggle to find information to help him make sense of what to do. Ultimately, he chose surgery, but the difficulty of the choice led him to create Soar Biodynamics, a company that offers decision-making support for men assessing their prostate health.Continue reading…

Transparency Works!!! (And better than you can imagine)

Nov 14, 2008• 2

By PAUL LEVY

I just saw clear evidence of the importance of transparency with regard
to the reporting of important adverse events and medical errors. Bear with me through the details, but I will not keep you in suspense regarding the conclusion: The wide disclosure of a “never” event in a blame-free manner resulted in an intensity of focus and communal effort to solve an important systemic problem, resulting in redesign of clinical procedures, buy-in from hundreds of relevant staff people, and an audit system that will monitor the effectiveness of the new approach and leave open the possibility for ongoing improvement.

If you ever needed a clear example of the power of transparency, here it is.

Back in early July, a patient experienced a wrong-side surgery in our hospital because the staff failed to carry out the required time-out. We disseminated the story of this event to all staff in the hospital. There was a full investigation of the matter, both internally and by the state DPH, and some immediate improvements were made in our procedures. But the more important work was being done by a Safety Culture Operational Task Force co-chaired by a nurse, a surgeon, and an anesthesiologist, and engaging almost two dozen other people from a variety of disciplines and positions in the hospital.

Its charge and mission: To implement and embed the Culture of Safety at the point of care in Perioperative Services, with an emphasis on teamwork and enhanced communications.