Hospitals Hiding Errors? Say it ain’t so. . .

The Latest Hammer Against Medicine in the US Raises Many Red Flags.

But I don’t think that it is a purposeful hiding of errors. No doubt there is deliberate deception, perhaps still out of fear of consequences, but the study itself seems to argue against that as a major cause.

Regardless, there are a lot of concerns raised by this study. While I haven’t had the opportunity to review the entire text at this point, it certainly raises some questions based on the initial press coverage.

• What role is being played by the decreased reimbursement to hospitals in the failure to report?
  • It certainly stands to reason that one possibility for decreased reporting is that hospitals are underfunded and, therefore, understaffed with the resulting employee being overworked.
  • I have seen this in hospitals across the country repeatedly suffering from this. It seems that that study will suggest that employees are failing to recognize the importance of reporting. One reason may be that they are overburdened with other duties to have the time to report what might seem to be a rather small problem.
• If these incidents aren’t being reported, it’s not because they’re being hidden.
  • Otherwise, physician reviewers would not have been able to identify the incident in the chart–it must be recorded.
  • Is it possible that the mechanism to get that information out of the chart and into the necessary database is unclear, overly burdensome, and or overly complicated?