Working hard on the design and implementation

of our innovative approach.

It’s about working collectively as individuals and organizations that care about making health care better in our nation.  No one is standing on sidewalks or in parks, but people want to help make a real change in our healthcare system so that we can all have access to quality care and we, as Americans, can afford to make this happen.  Just see what they’re saying on twitter using #occupyhealthcare under search.

I believe that in order to address the health care needs of the community, we need to address the culture of secrecy in medicine. This culture is a defensive stance brought about by fear of malpractice litigation against doctors and hospitals.

The problems is well put by the Joint Commission, ““There is in fact a fundamental dissonance between the medical liability system and the patient safety movement. The latter depends on the transparency of information on which to base improvement; the former drives such information underground.”

Health care providers need to have a safe and effective forum for these disclosures, or they do risk their words being used against them. Such a process will allow for fundamental change in health care. It will allow us to better understand what is working and what is not so that we can improve quality and safety, and improve efficiency in our system. As Maggie Mahar indicated, we can reduce the cost of health care by one third if we create a more efficient system so that more people can have access to quality care that we can afford. If doctors and hospital are less afraid of being sued, we can decrease defensive medicine and unnecessary tests and treatments.

Even the provision of good evidence based practices may be wrought with errors in the delivery. Errors that are most likely preventable through better system design (recall the IOM “To Err is Human” report estimating 90% of errors are system related?) We need to increase disclosure and transparency to create learning systems that lead to better process and system design.

We need to think about improving our nation’s health care from a broad perspective, and with 93% doctors saying they practice defensive medicine for fear of litigation, and a medical malpractice system that leave 99% of patients harmed by medical error uncompensated, we are foolish not to address this issue while looking at real change, #occupyhealthcare type change, for the patients everywhere in our country – which includes doctors and everyone else for that matter, as we are all patients at one time or another.