In his new book, Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care, Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary promises a “powerful, no-nonsense, nonpartisan prescription for reforming our broken health care system.” And he partly delivers, with an insider’s and relatively unvarnished view of many of the flaws in modern hospitals. Underlying these problems, he believes, is an utter lack of transparency, the sunshine that could disinfect the stink.
The thesis is important, the honesty is admirable, and the timing seems right. Yet I found the book disappointing, sometimes maddeningly so. My hopes were high, and my letdown was large. If your political leanings are like mine, think Obama and the first debate.
Makary hits the ground running, with the memorable tales of two surgeons he encountered during his training: the charming but utterly incompetent Dr. Westchester (known as HODAD, for “Hands of Death and Destruction”) and the misanthropic “Raptor,” a technical virtuoso who was a horse’s ass. Of course, all the clinicians at their hospital knew which of these doctors they would see if they needed surgery, but none of the patients did. (Of HODAD, Makary writes, “His patients absolutely worshipped him… They had no way of connecting their extended hospitalizations, excessive surgery time, or preventable complications with the bungling, amateurish, borderline malpractice moves we on the staff all witnessed.”)
This is compelling stuff, and through stories like these Makary introduces several themes that echo throughout the book:
1) There are lots of bad apples out there.
2) Patients have no way of knowing who these bad apples are.
3) Clinicians do know, but are too intimidated to speak up.
4) If patients simply had more data, particularly the results of patient safety culture surveys, things would get much better.
