A Follow up to Our Ethics Session

Hello everyone - I hope you all enjoyed the session with Paul Hoffman last week. It is amazing how broad a range of ethical issues there are to consider/manage as a healthcare professional - from any vantage point.

I saw this article come over the AP new wire today and it made me thing about Paul's point about inconvenient truths. Here is a link to the article and a small piece of the intro. What do you think is driving this behavior by physicians and what would it take to compell have a more ethically appealing approach?

Kim

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/usa_doctors_incompetence_dc

Nearly half of all U.S. doctors fail to report incompetent or unethical colleagues, even though they agree that such mistakes should be reported, researchers said on Monday.
They found that 46 percent of physicians surveyed admitted they knew of a serious medical error that had been made but did not tell authorities about it.
"There is a measurable disconnect between what physicians say they think is the right thing to do and what they actually do," said Eric Campbell of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, who led the survey.
Doctors are also surprisingly willing to order unnecessary -- and often expensive -- tests such as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI scans. Just 25 percent said they were looking out to ensure they did not unintentionally treat someone differently because of their sex or race, the survey found.

Dr. Drug

Hi everyone - hope you all had a nice holiday. I really enjoyed the comments on the last post - people had a range of reactions to the hospital CEO's blog. I think it can definitely be viewed on multiple levels ranging from a personal vanity project to a teaching tool for emerging health care leaders.

Below is a link that Amy asked me to post - this article appeared in the NYT yesterday and it is a very interesting look into the pharma-MD world and covers some ethical ground that may be relevant to the guest lecturer this week. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/magazine/25memoir-t.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=14f86674a4b9bfd7&ex=1196226000

Kim

Interesting Blog...

I was surfing around and came across a blog by a hospital CEO in Boston. He offers a unique lens into his hospital and his life as a CEO. Check out his 11/12 post on being a patient in his own facility. What do you think of his blog? Would you like having this type of access to a leader in an organization you are working for? What does it say about his leadership style and why else might he be maintaining a blog such as this one? http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/

Kim

Transparency of Quality Data in Hospitals

I came across an article in the October 2007 edition of HealthLeaders Magazine on the issues facing hospitals around sharing their quality data:

"Reporting quality scores on certain core measures is common practice for hospitals, but senior leaders across the country are encountering mounting pressure from board members, regulators, competitors and customers to take their data reporting a step further: full transparency. Hospital leaders and quality departments meet regularly to debate the whys and why nots of such disclosure, but few have pulled the trigger. With a small but growing number of hospitals opting to report quality data on their own Web sites, however, that could be changing."

What are your thoughts on how transparent a facility/system needs to be? Can you think of valid reasons why a facility might not want to share its data?

The full article can be found at http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/magazine/viewmagfeature/content/92899.html

Kim

SCHIP and Broader Debate

Thanks to everyone for the comments on the SPH dinner. Many of you brought up the SCHIP veto so I thought we could extend the dialogue using this NTY article that speculates about how the broader debate on healthcare will fare in the election year given the inability to enact something for low income children. The article can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/washington/06health.html

Your thoughts?

PS - Did anyone see the SCHIP parody on the Colbert Report the other day that panned back and forth between a group of children and legislators talking about SCHIP - hilarious!

Inital Posting/Last Week's Dinner Session

OK, we are now online and ready to go with a blog. Jeff and I will be seeding topics on a weekly basis and we'd like to see everyone commenting at least every other week. Students should feel free to add their own HPM related topics based on articles, classes or current events.

So, to get things rolling, what did people think of the speakers last Thursday? Did you find their message inspiring or did it make you wonder if any reform is possible? What did you think about the comments on term limits and the knowledge/power that senators/assembly persons have vs special intrest groups?