Patient Safety

HARRISBURG - A panel credited with reducing medical errors at Pennsylvania hospitals says its own health is endangered - by Gov. Corbett's plan to fold it into the state Department of Health. The board of the Patient Safety Authority adopted a resolution Tuesday saying such a move would destroy its autonomy. The privately funded authority, which collects and studies hospital data, has gained a national reputation for improving patient safety. "We felt strongly we should resist this movement," said the authority's acting chairman, Stanton Smullens, chief medical officer at Jefferson Health System in Philadelphia.

In a welcome call-to-arms over patient safety, a federal panel this week lamented that the typical American hospital has become a high-accident area. And there aren't enough hard hats to go around. The 19-member committee of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences found that life-threatening mistakes by doctors and other hospital staff rank among the nation's leading causes of death. "Health care is a decade or more behind other high-risk industries in its attention to ensuring basic safety," the panel said.

Nearly two decades after the death of 18-year-old Libby Zion in a Manhattan hospital while under the care of a poorly supervised and tired young doctor, the issue of fatigued resident physicians is again at the center of a national debate on patient safety. And with more than 4,000 young doctors working long hours to complete their training in area hospitals from South Jersey to Wilmington, the potential link between exhausted residents and medical mistakes is a particular concern here.

A bill to increase reporting of medical errors to improve patient safety was unanimously approved yesterday by a legislative committee. The Senate panel also heard testimony on how hospitals could prevent cases similar to that of Charles Cullen, the nurse who has claimed to have killed up to 40 patients at different hospitals over 16 years. State officials acknowledge that the current medical-reporting system is inadequate. Clifton R. Lacy, commissioner of the state Department of Health and Senior Services, said that "there is significant underreporting of errors" in New Jersey and around the country.

Pennsylvania's two most powerful health-care lobby groups joined together yesterday in an effort to reduce the cost of malpractice insurance premiums for doctors and hospitals. The Pennsylvania Medical Society, which represents doctors, and the Hospital and Health System Association of Pennsylvania announced a proposal to change the state's tort system, phase out the Medical Professional Liability Catastrophe Loss Fund, implement judicial reforms, and imrove patient safety. Unless changes are made, the two groups said, patient access to health care will be hurt.

The Albert Einstein Healthcare Network yesterday named Barry R. Freedman, former head of a large, embattled hospital in New York City, as chief executive officer and president. Freedman, 54, will take over May 12 from interim CEO A. Susan Bernini, who will return to her former post as chief operating officer of the North Philadelphia-based network. "Barry is a highly respected health-care executive with a national reputation for his collaborative relationships," said Joseph T. Sebastianelli, CEO of the Jefferson Health System, which includes Einstein.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health Thursday issued its most complete report to date of hospital infections, finding that a disproportionate number of poor-performing facilities were in Philadelphia. Those with high infection rates included some of the city's most storied hospitals, such as Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Executives at both institutions said they had made progress since 2009, the year the report focused on. And experts cautioned against using the report to compare hospitals, because the methodology to track infections is evolving.

Medicare's first public effort to pinpoint hospitals with high complication rates has identified many prestigious teaching hospitals in Pennsylvania and around the nation, raising concerns at these places but also bolstering objections that the government's measures are skewed. Temple University Hospital, Hahnemann University Hospital, Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals, and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania were among those places having far more serious complications than the average hospital, according to the Medicare program.

Some hospitals in Southeastern and South Central Pennsylvania have had security breaches in their newborn-care units. The Pennsylvania "Department of Health has become aware of a number of recent occurrences where one or more females attempted to access the OB [obstetric] or newborn-care areas . . . under false pretenses," said an alert e-mailed to hospitals last Thursday by the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania. "At some facilities, the woman requested a tour of the OB facility.

If a jumbo jet dropped out of the sky every other day, you can bet all your frequent-flier miles that the nation's leaders would leap into action with a plan to safeguard air travelers. So what's taken Washington policymakers so long to deal with a problem that contributes to as many as 98,000 deaths nationally each year? The problem is medical errors. The scale of the problem has been known at least since 1999, when a landmark Institute of Medicine study cited that number as the upper range of how many people are killed by medical errors annually.

Buried in the road to cost reduction for the federal government, in Section 227 of the House Subcommittee on Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2013, is a plan to defund the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). If this bomb goes off undetected, the nation will lose its greatest source for funding research on health-care quality, effectiveness, and patient safety. AHRQ funds the studies and systematic reviews that objectively evaluate how well clinical procedures, quality approaches, and consumer satisfaction work.

HARRISBURG - A panel credited with reducing medical errors at Pennsylvania hospitals says its own health is endangered - by Gov. Corbett's plan to fold it into the state Department of Health. The board of the Patient Safety Authority adopted a resolution Tuesday saying such a move would destroy its autonomy. The privately funded authority, which collects and studies hospital data, has gained a national reputation for improving patient safety. "We felt strongly we should resist this movement," said the authority's acting chairman, Stanton Smullens, chief medical officer at Jefferson Health System in Philadelphia.

Medicare's first public effort to pinpoint hospitals with high complication rates has identified many prestigious teaching hospitals in Pennsylvania and around the nation, raising concerns at these places but also bolstering objections that the government's measures are skewed. Temple University Hospital, Hahnemann University Hospital, Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals, and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania were among those places having far more serious complications than the average hospital, according to the Medicare program.

"It shows that there's a bigger problem at hand, and if they can't work to resolve these relatively small yet meaningful issues, what's going to happen if we get into a situation like Europe is in? And we're kind of headed there. " - Robert Pavlik, chief market strategist with Banyan Partners L.L.C., on the congressional supercommittee's failure to reach a deficit-cutting deal. "Markets are looking for clarity, and you didn't get that from the supercommittee. There's no reason to believe the economy is going to get stronger.

The attorney who collapsed during Monday's sentencing hearing for former Synthes Inc. executive Richard Bohner was released from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and was working Tuesday in his Washington office. Whether attorney Brent Gurney and his legal colleagues can persuade U.S. District Judge Legrome D. Davis, sitting in Philadelphia, to sentence Bohner, 56, of Malvern, to less prison time than his former Synthes colleagues will be settled at a yet-to-be rescheduled hearing.

HARRISBURG - Pennsylvania House Republicans yesterday beat back a series of proposed changes to a bill that would tighten supervision of abortion clinics by holding them to the same regulations that apply to freestanding ambulatory surgical centers. "This shouldn't be about whether you are pro-life or pro-choice," said the prime sponsor, Rep. Matt Baker, R-Tioga. "This is about patient safety. " Supporters said drastic changes are warranted in the wake of a scandal involving the West Philadelphia abortion clinic run by Kermit Gosnell in which a grand jury reported filthy and unsafe conditions.

The nation is facing an unprecedented drug shortage. From cancer treatments to surgical sedatives to standard emergency-room remedies, the pharmaceutical supply cabinet is increasingly bare of the drugs of choice, according to doctors, advocacy groups, and the FDA. Industry consolidation, random and unpredictable manufacturing problems, and simple economics, they say, have conspired to narrow the pipeline that delivers needed drugs to the point...

TWO RECENT reports have determined that hospital stays can be hazardous to your health. Still. In 1999, a shocking report by the independent Institute of Medicine, which advises the government on health issues, found that medical mistakes were the cause of a million injuries and up to 98,000 deaths a year. The report was supposed to be a turning point in the patient safety movement. In the years since, medical institutions have touted new measures to reduce hospital-acquired infections and medication errors as well as to prevent so-called "never events," the mistakes that are never supposed to happen in a health-care setting but too often do. Yet a study of 10 hospitals in North Carolina - a state that ranks high in patient-safety policies - found that things aren't improving.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health Thursday issued its most complete report to date of hospital infections, finding that a disproportionate number of poor-performing facilities were in Philadelphia. Those with high infection rates included some of the city's most storied hospitals, such as Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Executives at both institutions said they had made progress since 2009, the year the report focused on. And experts cautioned against using the report to compare hospitals, because the methodology to track infections is evolving.

Gov. Corzine said yesterday that the former head of the troubled Ancora Psychiatric Hospital would not be allowed to lead a unit that investigates assaults in New Jersey's mental institutions. He said the appointment of LaTanya Wood-El to lead the Patient Safety Compliance Unit was misguided, "given the circumstances we saw at Ancora. " "That person will not be filling that job," the governor said. Wood-El was removed from her job at the Winslow hospital in December after a string of incidents including two high-profile escapes and several patient suicides and assaults.