3 ms·
The original study's authors suggest adding a field to death certificates where the hospital personnel would put additional information about the cause of death
by HillaryBriss 11y ago
The original study's authors suggest adding a field to death certificates where the hospital personnel would put additional information about the cause of death:
... death certificates could contain an extra field asking whether a preventable complication stemming from the patient’s medical care contributed to the death.
How could they do this and, at the same time, shield themselves from lawsuits which use that "extra field" as evidence against them?
- x5n1 11y agoYou could pass a law to prevent or limit the amount that can be sued for negligence. It's I believe the case in Canada.
- Zigurd 11y agoFor a system that appears to be having a problem putting in quality controls, limiting liability runs the risk of having those limited payouts turn into a cost of doing business.
- x5n1 11y agoWell if you publish these cases online the hospital will lose substantial business. So it's like a canary. At least you are getting information about what's going wrong, and then you can put pressure on the management to fix it via other means like regulation, penalties, or whatever.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoOTOH doctors now do serious liability limitation by constantly worrying over their exposed "attack surface" in case something goes wrong. Having your medical staff being forced to be more worried about legal repercussions than well-being of their patients is not exactly healthy for anyone involved. Compare with aviation industry, where considerable effort was made to treat accidents as systemic problems and a) making sure individuals won't get immediately blamed for stuff that's not really their fault, and b) that everyone can learn as much as possible from every mistake made so that they don't happen again.
- dragonwriter 11y agoMalpractice limits exist in some jurisdictions in the US. Studies have shown that they do not have meaningful effects on the cost of liability insurance or the practice and cost of healthcare. (Which kind of makes sense: the limits are always adopted to prevent what are seen to be "extreme" awards which are awarded -- from the perspective of proponents of the limits -- by runaway courts/juries, or -- from the perspective of opponents -- for the most egregious incidents of malpractice; these make up a very small share of all awards and have a negligible effect on either a practitioner's or an insurer's exposure. You'd have to limit malpractice awards at a level that would affect common and uncontroversially warranted awards to have a meaningful effect.)
- saint_fiasco 11y agoThat has the unfortunate effect of anchoring the amount so many people who would have sued for a modest amount see the limit and sue for that amount instead.
- jellicle 11y ago> How could they do this and, at the same time, shield themselves from lawsuits Why is that a desirable goal?
- x1798DE 11y agoBecause otherwise no one would use that field, and you might as well not have it at all.
- Spooky23 11y agoHospitals are a mix of stakeholders, all of whom have different agendas. There's something to be said for a blame-free environment where you can actually get honest post-mortem assessments.
- blahedo 11y agoBecause if not, you provide them with an extremely compelling incentive to lie.
- mhuffman 11y agoSo they could have a consequence-free way to accumulate analytics to make healthcare better. If you have no metrics of a problem, you have no idea how big the problem is, right? Or if a problem needs to be solved. Or how.