Insights from the Armstrong Institute
Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist Oliver Schein has found a simple way to save a half a billion dollars a year from our country's health-care bill, with no negative effect on patient health. The only thing standing in the way is a stubborn government requirement. Seventeen years ago, Dr. Schein and colleagues published a study finding that(...)
Her voice cracked with strain. I could imagine the woman at the other end of the line shaking, overcome with remorse about the hospital where her husband had had esophageal surgery. Might he still be alive, she asked me, if they had chosen a different hospital? The couple had initially planned to have the procedure(...)
If you understand statistics and possess the intestinal fortitude to examine a ranking methodology, you will recognize that it involves ingredients that have to be recombined, repackaged and renamed. It's messy, like sausage-making. This is not to say that the end product — hospital rankings — are distasteful. Patients deserve valid, transparent and timely information(...)
In recent years, Johns Hopkins Medicine has grown increasingly sophisticated in its use of patient safety and quality dashboards, not just to spur internal improvement efforts but also to increase transparency with the public about our performance. In 2013, we launched an internal dashboard for our health system’s 41,000 employees, sharing our performance data on(...)
Selecting the right hospital to receive care can save your life, lower your risks of getting a complication, or even reduce your financial hardship. The problem is that it's extremely hard for patients to make that judgment. Sometimes, the data they need to select the best hospital for their care doesn't exist. In other cases(...)
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Fifteen-year anniversaries often come and go without fuss, overlooked in favor of those we can mark in full decades. Yet recently, at Johns Hopkins and nationally, we've crossed that mark for a couple of events in patient safety that merit both celebration and reflection. In January 2001, a series of lapses at Johns Hopkins led(...)
In this post, I present the case that U.S. News & World Report’s patient safety score, a component of its annual Best Hospitals rankings, has a bias against Maryland hospitals. Two editors at U.S. News respond to my position at the bottom of the post. Hospitals can get overwhelmed by the array of ratings, rankings(...)
Most of us would agree that there aren't enough valid and meaningful health care quality measures to guide patients' choices of hospitals and physicians. While the federal government has steadily expanded the number of publicly available measures on its Hospital Compare website, it still falls short of what many patients, payers and providers would like.(...)
In the world of medicine, blood clots during hospitalization have become synonymous with imperfect care. As many as 600,000 patients per year experience a blood clot, and more than 100,000 die as a result, accounting for between 5 and 10 percent of hospital deaths. Regulatory agencies have taken clots as signals that safety and quality(...)