Overdose

On April 4, 1997, Charles Blair wrote a letter for the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Hospitals Organization (JCAHO) to a Hospital Administrator. The JCAHO letter describes a “sentinel event” that occurred in March, during which a patient died in the Hospital Recovery Room from an overdose of concentrated medicine given by her healthcare providers […]

The Cost of Care

Dartmouth study on reigning in healthcare costs This chart on the left (in the article linked above) was originally created by the Kaiser Foundation and is now outdated (as shown in the chart on the right) – largely because the cost of drugs, medical devices and hospitalizations has skyrocketed. As a percentage, the amount we spend on primary […]

Mortality

In one-quarter of the country, girls born today may live shorter lives than their mothers, and the country as a whole is falling behind other industrialized nations in the march toward longer life, according to a study just released by the Institute for Health Metrics. Life expectancy by county in the U.S. varies as much as […]

ACA Survives As Florida Legislature Debates Abolishing PIP

Last week, Congress failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act or to replace it with a bill that would have upended Americans’ access to healthcare for the second time in the last few years. As noted on this blog, the American healthcare system has been in a never-ending state of upheaval for generations. Political “fixes” […]

Quality Fraud by Omission

More Than Half of Failed Clinical Trials Unpublished   Less than half of failed clinical trials are published in peer review journals, according to a new study. Practically, this may be due to the fact that there are no sponsors or financial stakeholders willing to contribute to a public relations push when their new ‘wonder […]

Metrics For A New ‘Patient-Centric’ Safety Movement

According to the Institute of Medicine in the 1990’s, an estimated 100,000 people died as a result of medical mistakes every year in the U.S. (a number that has more than doubled, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins University). The Institute of Medicine (IOM) is a Congressionally mandated, non-profit research body. Their initial […]