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scientific studies. That's not nearly accurate enough.
What can be done to better
understand gaps in safe patient care?
As a cancer surgeon, I record the cancer type, the subtype, the disease stage,
the patient's age and the patient's demographic information for every case I per-
form — and all that info gets fed into national health statistics each year. We
need that same level of scientific rigor to study the problem of medical care
gone wrong.
Is a lack of healthcare
transparency also part of the problem?
Absolutely. When someone develops breast cancer, everyone in the community is
aware. When someone dies because of communication breakdowns, a technical
error, a lack of humility, or over-treatment or under-treatment, no one talks about
it. We don't have open and honest conversations about the problem. In fact, hospi-
tals have a general policy of gagging doctors and patients involved in legal claims
settled out of court. That's the exact opposite approach that we need to have.
OSM
Dr. Makary (mmakary1@jhmi.edu) is the surgical director of the Johns Hopkins Multidisciplinary
Pancreatitis Center in Baltimore, Md., and best-selling author of the book Unaccountable: What Hospitals
Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care.