I recently participated in a meeting whose aim was to develop safety measures for hospital units (ie, med-surg, ED, L&D). As various measures were being ticked off, I muttered that we should also try to capture errors that occur as patients move between units. One of my colleagues, quite sensibly, asked, “but who will be accountable for that?” ...

Today my pals Peter Lindenauer and Andy Auerbach (and colleagues) published the largest hospitalist outcomes study to date, in the New England Journal of Medicine. It is a rigorous, important piece of work. Let me try to add a bit of context.First, the What’s What. Using the massive database of the Premier system (which Peter has mined to ...

Stuff this week that caught my eye: Does medical tourism harm the natives? Are all those CT scans destroying more than our budgets? Are nocturnalists at risk for more than decubs? Will Medicare need to cut hospital payments to fuel P4P? Answers: yes, yes, probably, and duh.Yesterday, NPR’s All Things Considered described the dark side of medical ...

Earlier this week, I discussed the preliminary results of the POISE trial, the blockbuster that showed that perioperative beta blockers may cause more harm than good. I've asked my UCSF colleague Andy Auerbach, one of the nation's experts on this intervention, to help us understand these truly surprising results. Andy's comments follow:''The POISE ...

As I mentioned when we launched, this blog won’t be your destination for a weekly journal update (there are plenty of sites for that). But I will keep an eye on the literature and let you know when I see something remarkable. And then I’ll try to put it in context.Last week, there were three such studies. First, an abstract presented at the ...