Dirty, dirty hospitals

The cover story in Forbes Magazine this month is 'Bad Medecine', and delves into the astonishing death / complication rate found in large hospitals and the barriers they provide to building smaller specialty hospitals. Let me share some quotes from the article:

"Hospitals are still the heart of the health care industry, consuming a third of the $2 trillion U.S. health care bill"

"One in 200 patients who spends a night or more in a hospital will die from medical error. One in 16 will pick up an infection. Deaths from preventable hospital infections each year exceed 100,000, more than those from AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined."

Wow. That means the biggest epidemic in America is not cancer or AIDS, but dirty hospitals.

And here is a quote that shows how streamlining care and administration can both cut costs and improve patient outcome:

"Specialty hospitals' financial success is part of what rankles their large competitors, especially given that they get paid the same for a given procedure. As she walks by the player piano in the lobby of the Oklahoma Heart Hospital, chief operating officer and nurse Peggy Tipton explains that the $108 million hospital did more than 1,000 bypasses and valve repairs last year. Its patient charts and drug ordering are all-digital. It has a one-to-one nurse-patient ratio in critical care and one-to-four in the rest. Patients are transported by nurses, not orderlies. The elapsed time from when a patient arrives at the er to treatment in the cath lab is never more than 90 minutes"

Moreover, hospitals are lobbying to have data such as nosocomial (hospital acquired) infection deaths to be kept private.

I'm so glad to know that the behemoths of American medicine have my best health at heart.