Safety Net

A technique for using senior hospital executives to improve patient safety is proving so successful that one hospital in Boston is now applying it to ambulatory sites.

When a patient has an adverse medical event, it may or may not be the result of a medical error. Legal Editor Frank Reardon says that what you do after an adverse outcome has a lot to do with whether a patient wants to sue someone.

Research indicates primary care physicians often lack vital clinical information about patients during office visits. In a study conducted by University of Colorado researchers, physicians reported that one in seven appointments lacked significant clinical information about the patient, such as lab results, medications, and history.

In their discussion of imperfection, Malcolm Gladwell and Dr. Atul Gawande will break down the thinking process, and examine how the various components impact health care providers. Gladwell and Gawande explore how "thinking without thinking" can hurt clinicians -- and patients -- and how it can help them.

Dr. Thomas Delbanco of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston has blazed a trail in primary care and patient-centered care for more than three decades. In his film he aims to give viewers some sense of how we might sort out the experience of patients who've had things go wrong for them.

We found that the surgeons did the best in the area of explaining the medical facts of the event. But they struggled in other areas: taking responsibility for the event, apologizing for the event, and explaining to the patients about how recurrences of the error would be prevented.