Insights from the Armstrong Institute
If we want to rein in the costs of the U.S. health-care system — now equal to nearly 18 percent of the nation's gross domestic product — we cannot ignore the fragmented technologies used to help heal and save lives. At first glance, the devices, monitors, electronic health records and machines found in today's hospitals(...)
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 2013, a 52-year-old man went to an emergency department complaining of dizziness. Physicians evaluated him, decided that it was a benign condition — as it usually is — and sent him home. Days later, it became apparent that this was no harmless event. He suffered a significant stroke, with permanent disability as the result.(...)
In the technology-thick landscape of modern health care, the physical exam remains in a backwoods. Sure, there have been advances — blood-pressure cuffs, for example, now inflate themselves — but on the whole the exam has barely changed in the past century. Patients still open up and say "ah," take deep breaths and gaze at(...)
Health care has been thinking about medical errors for nearly 20 years, starting with the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report “To Err is Human.” This and other work across the country have correctly shed light upon such medical errors as amputation of the wrong limb, inpatient adverse drug events and hospital-acquired infections, and we have(...)
Every American will experience a missed or delayed diagnosis at some point in his or her lifetime. Saying that is not a scare tactic — it's a reality, according to a 2015 National Academy of Medicine report titled "Improving Diagnosis in Health Care." Yet we have not made effective use of a simple solution: teamwork.(...)
There has been no shortage of blame for the poisoning of Flint, Michigan's water supply. In March, a governor-appointed task force issued a report that rebuked local, state and federal authorities for their actions — and inactions — that created the public health crisis. Then, in late April, state prosecutors announced the first charges in the(...)
For anyone with a serious medical condition, frequent hospitalizations and clinic visits can have a profoundly disruptive impact. Yet adolescent and teenage patients have a uniquely challenging experience. A boy who would otherwise be playing on a soccer team or performing in a play may be undergoing chemotherapy. A girl who had expected to be(...)
Tens of thousands of people owe their lives to extracorporeal life support (ECLS) — a treatment that uses mechanical devices to perform the work of the heart and lungs for days, weeks or even months when those organs cannot function on their own. With ECLS, we can give newborns with major congenital defects a fighting(...)
How would you react if you sent your sputtering car to the auto mechanic, and they stopped trying to diagnose the problem after 15 minutes? You would probably revolt if they told you that your time was up and gave back the keys. Yet in medicine, it's common for practices to schedule patient visits in(...)