Hits & Misses – 2009/01/21
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Do the members of your surgical team even know each other's names?
[A] 19-point checklist…[including] basic safety measures, such as ensuring that patients get antibiotics to prevent infection and requiring that all members of the team introduce themselves…reduced the number of deaths from surgery by more than 40%.
Best way to lose weight: do it yourself.
More than half of successful dieters lose weight on their own…without the aid of a commercial diet program, medical treatment, book, or diet pills.
The $452 cost of genetic testing will always be a bargain compared with wasting tens of thousands of dollars giving drugs to people who have no chance of being helped.
I get the impression that hospitals are typically very inefficient. Why would someone have to publish a checklist? Doesn’t every efficient production process have a checklist? Isn’t that what producers do?
The more amazing thing is that, by implication, members of a surgical team apparently do not know each other a significant number of times.
The pharmaceutical industry probably doesn’t want us to know about the genetic tests. They would sell fewer drugs if people were screened first.
To Stehpen’s point,there is a very good reason most hospitals don’t follow the checklist. They profit from their mistakes. Every mistake they make creates a new health problem, which means a new reason to bill the third party payers.