Resources For The Well-Informed Patient

ARTICLES ON HEALTH CARE REFORM

Weighing the Costs of a CT Scan’s Look Inside the Heart - ALEX BERENSON and REED ABELSON, NY Times LINK

Humble checklists are real lifesavers – Graham Lanktree, National Review of Medicine LINK

Doctors Say ‘I’m Sorry’ Before ‘See You in Court’ – KEVIN SACK, NY Times LINK

Patients often struggle for access to medical records. - Robert Davis, USA TODAY LINK

Testing the Limits of Transparency - A few hospitals are inviting patients’ families to join them in root cause analysis discussions. - By Patrice Spath, Hospitals & Health Networks LINK

The choice between expanding health coverage and controlling healthcare costs is a false choice based on a false assumption: that resources committed to healthcare are used efficiently and effectively. The mistaken notion makes budgeting the key decision and masks a much better alternative. There is ample evidence that better care could be provided to more people at lower cost if care delivery were organized in a more sophisticated fashion. LINK

Although virtually all doctors think they should report impaired or incompetent colleagues or serious medical errors to the relevant authorities, nearly half don't, a study suggests Monday. LINK

Why pay for mistakes? The announcement that Medicare will no longer pay hospitals for "conditions that could reasonably have been prevented" is a loud and, many would say, long-overdue wake-up call for American hospitals. LINK

San Francisco's five nonprofit hospitals received $79 million last year in tax breaks intended to compensate them for providing free care to the city's poor and uninsured, but they spent just $16 million on charity care, according to a new city report. LINK

In nearly a third of cases of sudden cardiac arrest in the hospital, the staff takes too long to respond, increasing the risk of brain damage and death, a new study finds. LINK