A remarkable aspect of the Parkland Memorial Hospital saga was the degree to which the hospital’s Board was not given information by senior management about the clinical outcomes in their hospital. The lack of transparency, in other words, even went to management’s relationship with its fiduciary board.
A recent article by the Dallas Morning News outlines some of these points:
On August 19, the hospital’s seven-member board of directors got its first chance to read the full report by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Almost 10 days had passed since [the CEO] first received the findings. As members began leafing through pages of the report, surprise, even shock, began to register.
The Chair of the board said, “We had direct culpability, but none of us even knew we were in the report.”
