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Showing posts from September, 2012

The Secret that Doctors Know...and You Should Too.

I read this in Newsweek while getting ready for work this morning.  I'd like to say it surprised me, but unfortunately, it doesn't.  We live in a free country where we can get candid reviews on everything from restaurants to lawnmowers to investments, but when it comes to the most important thing--our health (and life itself)--we have almost no information about our hospitals . A 2010  New England Journal of Medicine  study concluded that as many as 25 percent of all hospitalized patients will experience a preventable medical error of some kind, and 100,000 will die annually because of errors. If medical error were a disease, it would be the sixth-leading cause of death in the country. How can we as consumers of healthcare make informed choices when we don't have information on where the best and safest care is provided? Take, for instance, the National Practitioner Data Bank collected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is also known as the nati