A couple of months ago, a Baltimore reporter called to get my take on a scandal at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Towson, an upscale suburb. A rainmaker cardiologist there, Dr. Mark Midei, had been accused of placing more than 500 stents in patients who didn’t need them, justifying the procedures by purposely misreading cath films. In several of the cases, Midei allegedly read a 90 percent coronary stenosis when the actual blockage was trivial – more like 10 percent.
Disgusting, I thought… if the reports are true, they should lock this guy in jail and throw away the key. After all, the victims now have permanent foreign bodies in their vascular beds, and both the stent and the accompanying blood thinners confer a substantial lifetime risk of morbidity and mortality. As I felt my own blood beginning to boil, the reporter asked a question that threw me back on my heels.
“Why didn’t peer review catch this?” he asked.
Hospital peer review is getting better, partly driven by more aggressive accreditation standards for medical staff privileging. In my role as chief of the medical service at UCSF Medical Center, I’m now expected to monitor a series of signals looking for problem doctors: low procedural volumes, unusual numbers of complications, and frequent patient complaints, unexpected deaths, and malpractice suits. When a flashing red light goes off, my next step is to commission a focused review of the physician’s practice. The process remains far from perfect, but it is an improvement over the traditional system, in which docs tapped a couple of their golfing buddies to vouch for their competence.Continue reading…