Marshall_Allen

On page 22 of that same OIG report the physician reviewers estimated that 44 percent of the harm suffered by patients was clearly or likely preventable.

We've had our hands pretty full with this analysis, but have heard of what you're talking about. If you have any examples you'd like to share, please email me at [email protected].

One other thing I would add about choosing a doctor or a hospital - I would go to the providers who are transparent about their results and welcome these type of conversations. I found it interesting the way doctors and hospitals responded when we contacted them about our findings. Some, like the Beaumont Health System in Detroit, welcomed us to come visit and were transparent in every way they could be. They did this even though their results were not great in our analysis. Others tried to confuse the issues, avoid the questions, or just refuse to comment at all. We delve into some of the issues here: https://www.propublica.org/article/surgery-risks-patient-safety-surgeon-matters

I'm not familiar enough with that column to address it directly, but can say that the complications we are looking at are just one way to measure the quality of care. It's important to know the rate of patients who died during the admission for the surgery, or were readmitted with a complication related to the surgery, but those are not the only considerations. The data we used, which is the only kind publicly available nationally for this type of research, can't answer every question, so we've limited our analysis to concrete type of complications that can be identified in the data. So patients would just need to speak to their doctors about the other ways surgical quality is measured.

That is a scary number. Those numbers are based on reviews of medical charts that are then extrapolated to the wider population. This OIG study estimated that about 13.5 percent of Medicare beneficiaries suffer an adverse event during a hospitalization. So that's getting a little closer to showing the prevalence of this type of harm. https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-09-00090.pdf