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Tag: medical error

When Medical Error Becomes Personal, Activism Becomes Painful

BY MICHAEL MILLENSON

In the mid-1990s, researching a book about the quality of medical care, I discovered how the profession had for years been ignoring evidence about the appalling death toll from preventable medical error. Though I’d never myself experienced an error, I became an activist.

Recently, however, a relative was a victim, and the frustrating persistence of error became personally painful.

Thanks to my relative being acutely aware of the need to be alert (and a bit of luck), no harm was caused by what could have been a serious medication mistake. That was the good news. The bad news is that even Famous Name Hospitals, like the one where my relative was treated, are rarely doing everything possible to forestall the impact of inevitable human fallibility.

September 17 was World Patient Safety Day, and the theme for the next 12 months is “Medication Without Harm.” That makes this an opportune time to examine more closely what the profession euphemistically calls a “medication misadventure.”

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7 Ways We’re Screwing Up AI in Healthcare

The healthcare AI space is frothy.  Billions in venture capital are flowing, nearly every writer on the healthcare beat has at least an article or two on the topic, and there isn’t a medical conference that doesn’t at least have a panel if not a dedicated day to discuss. The promise and potential is very real.

And yet, we seem to be blowing it.

The latest example is an investigation in STAT News pointing out the stumbles of IBM Watson followed inevitably by the ‘is AI ready for prime time’ debate. If course, IBM isn’t the only one making things hard on itself. Their marketing budget and approach makes them a convenient target. Many of us – from vendors to journalists to consumers – are unintentionally adding degrees to an already uphill climb.

If our mistakes led to only to financial loss, no big deal. But the stakes are higher. Medical error is blamed for killing between 210,000 and 400,000 annually. These technologies are important because they help us learn from our data – something healthcare is notoriously bad at. Finally using our data to improve really is a matter of life and death.

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How Radiologists Think

flying cadeuciiDiagnostic tests such as CAT scans are not perfect. A test can make two errors. It can call a diseased person healthy – a false negative. This is like acquitting a person guilty of a crime. Or a test can falsely call a healthy person diseased – a false positive. This is like convicting an innocent person of a crime that she did not commit. There is a trade-off between false negatives and false positives. To achieve fewer false negatives we incur more false positives.

Physicians do not want to be wrong. Since error is possible we must choose which side to err towards. That is we must choose between two wrongness. We have chosen to reduce false negatives at the expense of false positives. Why this is so is illustrated by screening mammography for breast cancer.

A woman who has cancer which the mammogram picks up is thankful to her physician for picking up the cancer and, plausibly, saving her life.

A woman who does not have cancer and whose mammogram is normal is also thankful to her physician. The doctor does not deserve to be thanked as she played no hand in the absence of the patient’s cancer. But instead of thanking genes or the cosmic lottery, the patient thanks the doctor.

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An Extremely Teachable Moment

John Mandrola MDIt was a mistake to send the Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan home from a Dallas emergency room after he presented with fever and pain, which were early signs of Ebola infection.

It would be a larger mistake to miss an important learning opportunity. This case demonstrates what I believe to be a major threat to patient safety—caregiver distraction.

Doctors and nurses are increasingly prevented from giving full attention to the important things in patient care. The degree of value-added nonsense has reached the point where delivering basic care has gown dangerous. This morning, in Canada, news of a case of deadly drug interaction occurred because of alert fatigue—or distraction.

I am a cardiologist; I am also a patient. I want the Duncan case to be a turning point, a wake up call, a never event that serves as a spark to improve the delivery of medical care. Right now, all that this case has changed are tweaks to EHR protocols and checklists. We need more than tweaks; we need big changes.

An uncomfortable truth is that medical mistakes are normal. Errors, like this one in Texas, have occurred since doctors started treating patients. The good news is that technology has made medical care better. No credible person suggests a return to the paper-chart era. Yet, it is still our duty to face mistakes, learn from them, and in so doing, improve future care. Being honest about root causes is necessary.

Another truth about medical mistakes is the ensuing rush to inoculate against blame–which always comes. In the Duncan case, initial blame was assigned to the electronic health record. The computer software failed to flag the travel history in the physician “workflow.” (Just using the word, workflow, hints of the bureaucracy problem.) And you know there is trouble when hospital administrators use the passive voice. “Protocols were followed by both the physician and the nurse…”

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Things That Make Me Worry About My Colonoscopy

The Pentax Colonoscope. Source: University of Illinois Wiki

Sorry to get all Katie Couric on you, but I’m going to have a colonoscopy on Friday. I turned 40 last October and I have some family history that leads my doctor to get one done now rather than at 50.

Unlike Katie, I won’t be broadcasting mine live, but I’ll share some articles and reflections on the process and, being process focused, what could go wrong. It’s a very necessary procedure, but there are, sadly, some very unnecessary and preventable risks.

According to  Dr. Wikipedia (backed by journals):

This procedure has a low (0.35%) risk of serious complications

That’s about 1 in 300 patients, put another way.

For those of you who speak Six Sigma, that’s a 99.65% first time yield and a 4.2 sigma level.

That’s not going to scare me away.

Maybe I should have asked what my physician’s complication rates are. What are the complication rates at the surgical center where this will be done? Is this safer than being at a full-blown hospital or doesn’t it matter? Should I be more of an “engaged patient?”

Should I have asked more questions of my primary care provider? Why did she refer me to this GI specialist? Is he a “Best” doctor? Does that matter?

If I treat them as a supplier (respectfully), should I be able to walk the process and see what they do to prevent, say, instrument or scope disinfection errors?

Should I have asked:

  • Show me how you disinfect the equipment
  • Show me your training records for the people doing this work
  • Show me your equipment maintenance records
  • How do you verify that the work is being done properly?
  • Have you had any complaints or incidents in the past?

I had my pre-procedure phone call on Monday. Maybe I should follow up and ask a few of these questions, even if I can’t go “walk the gemba” to check things out myself. What would you do?

Of course, I didn’t have data or information available to me to know:

  • Which specialist is best at this?
  • Who has the highest or lowest complication rates?
  • What are the prices for different doctors or locations?

I don’t know how a busy person makes an informed decision.

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Still Demanding Medical Excellence

Forget for a moment the familiar scenes of action and outraged reaction that are playing out in our long-running national debate over how best to provide access to health care for every American. Instead, ask one simple question: what happens in the doctor’s office or hospital once access is achieved.

I set out to write a book addressing that question almost twenty years ago. I thought myself well qualified: I’d written about health care for a decade for the Chicago Tribune while receiving various awards and other recognition. But it didn’t take long for a painful realization to set in of how naïve I really was.

Digging through hundreds of studies, articles and other first-hand sources stretching back for decades, I was stunned to discover that repeated evidence of unsafe, ineffective, wasteful and downright random care had had no effect whatsoever on how doctors treated patients. Literally none. Moreover, the few professionals who understood this truth couldn’t talk about it in public without endangering their careers or engendering vitriol from peers.

Fortunately, I had no academic or clinical career to imperil. In the conclusion to Demanding Medical Excellence: Doctors and Accountability in the Information Age, I gave vent to anger and indignation. I wrote:

From ulcers to urinary tract infections, tonsils to organ transplants, back pain to breast cancer, asthma to arteriosclerosis, the evidence is irrefutable. Tens of thousands of patients have died or been injured year after year because readily available information was not used ­– and is not being used today – to guide their care. If one counts the lives lost to preventable medical mistakes, the toll reaches the hundreds of thousands.

The only barrier to saving these lives is the willingness of doctors and hospital administrators to change.

Demanding Medical Excellence came out in October, 1997. What progress has been made since then, and where we have fallen short? I address that question in a short article, “The Long Wait for Medical Excellence,” in the October, 2013 issue of Health Affairs. The purpose of this blog entry is to recap some of what’s said there (for you non-subscribers) and to add a few impolite observations that don’t jibe with the rules of a peer-reviewed journal.

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My Minute with Andy Rooney

Pat Mastors, a patient safety advocate, has written a clever blog post called, “A Few More Minutes with Andy Rooney.” Channeling the curmudgeonly tones of a 60 Minutes commentary, it begins:

I died last week, just a month after I said goodbye to you all from this very desk. I had a long and happy life – well, as happy as a cranky old guy could ever be. 92. Not bad. And gotta say, seeing my Margie, and Walter, and all my old friends again is great.

But then I read what killed me: “serious complications following minor surgery.”

Now what the heck is that?

The blog goes on to have Rooney ask for someone to find out what actually killed him. This has offended some respondents who, blinded by their own biases, think a writer using a celebrity’s death to push for information that could be used to improve care is the same thing as accusing his physicians of negligence or hauling Rooney’s family into court to publicly disclose private details.

Don’t you hate people like that?

OK, that was a cheap Andy Rooney imitation. But as it happens, I did have a phone conversation with Rooney about patient safety.  It came right after the Institute of Medicine released its landmark report, To Err is Human, in November, 1999. The appalling toll of medical errors wasn’t exactly a secret back then, but doctors and hospitals had gotten used to publicly tut-tutting about the “price we pay” for medical progress every time a new study came out and then going back to doing exactly what they’d been doing before.

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