The Health Care Blog

Dennis Quaid takes on hospital errors

By Sarah Arnquist Hospital patient safety has a new celebrity advocate in Dennis Quaid, whose twin newborns received a massive overdose of a blood thinner last year at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center while being treated for infections. While his twins bled...
March 28, 2008 in Hospitals, Patient Safety, Quality | Permalink | Comments (11)

Lessons From a Sad Error

By Paul Levy I think many people have seen this sad story of a wrong-sided kidney removal in Minnesota. We all feel the pain for this poor patient. It is difficult for us non-physicians to understand how this happens, for...
March 20, 2008 in Hospitals, Patient Safety | Permalink | Comments (2)

Loving Our Children

By Brian Klepper Among its many less-noticed accomplishments, this Administration has strangled funding for comprehensive sex education. Instead, it has thrown the immense weight of the US government behind abstinence-based education, an impractical ideological approach rooted in religious zealotry and...
March 14, 2008 in Brian Klepper, Patient Safety, Policy, Policy/Politics, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (1)

Four Big Trends - Brian Klepper

Several events and trends emerged over the last year that will reverberate throughout the health care marketplace in 2008 and going forward. While none of these dominated the trade press like some other issues - electronic and personal health records,...
January 16, 2008 in Brian Klepper, Health 2.0, Health Plans, Hospitals, Medicare Advantage, Patient Safety, Physician Rating, Physicians, Policy/Politics, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (8)

Look at How Safe [Fill in the Blank] Is by Bob Wachter

But is it as simple as that really? Perhaps not. In the commentary that follows, Bob Wachter has a very different take on the airline analogy. Analogies are useful things, true, he argues. But perhaps not as useful as the...
December 29, 2007 in Bob Wachter, Hospitals, Patient Safety | Permalink | Comments (2)

HOSPITALS: Dennis Quaid's Kids - Are VIPs Safer? By Bob Wachter

Robert Wachter is widely regarded as a leading figure in the modern patient safety movement. Together with Dr. Robert Goldman, he coined the term "hospitalist" in an 1996 essay in The New England Journal of Medicine. His most recent book,...
November 26, 2007 in Bob Wachter, Patient Safety | Permalink | Comments (6)

When is a Medical Error a Crime? by Bob Wachter

Bob Wachter is one of the nation's leading experts on medical safety and one of the pioneers of the hospitalist movement. And now he's descending into the mire of blogging! So we're pleased to cross post one of the more...
November 16, 2007 in Bob Wachter, Hospitals, Patient Safety | Permalink | Comments (16)