Despite the heralded To Err Is Human, there is still no effective risk management strategy to prevent medical liability. Past discussions on KevinMD have explored a risk-management strategy that differentiates medical errors from random errors of nature with 95 percent confidence. Like any decision-making method, this strategy has weaknesses that deserve mention.
Weaknesses of the strategy
Becoming a doctor is often seen as a noble quest—a path filled with sacrifice, resilience, and the ultimate reward of helping others. We all start the same way: pre-med studies, endless exams, and the grueling four years of medical school. It’s a journey filled with sleepless nights, skipped meals, and cramming obscure diseases into our already overloaded brains. But we keep going, fueled by the dream of finally being called …
I was approaching the final rotations of my third year in medical school when it came time to create my fourth-year schedule. I wanted to participate in electives that aligned with my passions for advocacy and addressing health disparities but were also unique. That’s when I stumbled upon a few courses at a nearby law school that explored the intersection of law and medicine.
Though I knew the course was offered …
Perpetually late to the game, I was watching The Crown on my laptop Friday night, the wonderful episode set in the summer of 1969, when astronauts landed on the moon. While the world gazed into the heavens, series creator Peter Morgan looked around here on Earth and asked, What does it all mean?
Contrasted against this crowning scientific achievement was the Duke of Edinburgh’s personal crisis of faith. When NASA launched, …
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Family physician Tony Gerk discusses the article, “Even medical practices aren’t immune from the high cost of employer-provided health insurance.” In this episode, Tony explains the challenges small medical practices face due …
How do I get accepted to medical school? This is the question at the forefront of every premedical student’s mind. As the competitiveness of each medical school application cycle increases and it feels like all those applying have cured cancer, dedicated their entire lives to some amazing community service effort, achieved a perfect MCAT score, and found time to invent a time machine, the importance of good writing and weaving …
A recent Time magazine article, “Women Live Longer Than Men—But Not in Medicine,” confirmed what many of us have long felt in our bones: Being a woman in medicine comes at a cost.
A staggering one.
Women physicians are dying younger than male physicians. Younger than women in the general population.
And that’s just what the mortality data shows.
The morbidity—the chronic health issues, the …
The electronic health record (EHR) has solved the illegibility issue of handwritten notes, but the downside and unintended consequences have been of equal or greater importance. The cult of the EHR “copy and paste” (CP) club in hospital care makes defending a Medicare billing audit a daunting task should a physician be required to justify their level of professional billing codes. The much more important issue, however, is that patient …
Imagine this: Two attending surgeons undertake a surgical procedure on a patient. The surgical residents have draped the patient; the surgical tech and the circulating nurse are ready to begin the operation. The surgical attendings enter the OR, scrub in, and move to the next order of business: “How are we going to bill for this procedure?”
Often, there is an unspoken—and spoken—consensus that the medical field is a lucrative one. …
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Internal medicine physician Corinne Rao discusses the article, “The Faustian bargain of modern medicine.” In this episode, Corinne explores the modern health care system’s trade-offs, comparing the traditional independence of private practice …
Throughout my residency, I’ve had the opportunity to perform autopsies on many different people from different walks of life. One case in particular stood out to me. The decedent was not in the greatest state of health at the time of death and subsequent postmortem examination. After I removed his heart from the pericardial sac and began dissecting each coronary artery in sequential tangential sections back to their origins on …
The song from the Broadway musical Hamilton, “(Yorktown) The World Turned Upside Down,” is stuck in my head. Indeed, these are no ordinary times. We have a measles outbreak in the U.S. that has resulted in numerous …
My wife once told me, “It was like everyone was your friend.” And she may be right. I connect well with others and take an honest interest in them. In practice, I always ask where they are from. I find that a great opener, and even Alzheimer’s patients and the elderly can often answer that one. I have done that since my paramedic days.
Don’t get me wrong, though, as I …
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Health care systems worldwide are grappling with access, efficiency, and sustainability challenges. In Canada, the debate over public versus private care is especially charged, and nowhere is this more evident than in Quebec. The province has the highest number of physicians practicing outside the public system in the country—yet they still account for only 2 percent of all doctors. Instead of vilifying these professionals, policymakers should be asking: What lessons …
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Board-certified pediatric endocrinologist, field medical director for type 1 diabetes immunology (T1D) at Sanofi, and T1D survivor Shara Bialo discusses the article, “Improving type 1 diabetes screening awareness among women is critical. …
Many moons ago, I worked in a forensics lab for a pair of professors who were husband and wife—a chemistry dynamic duo. I had a wonderful time in bench research, learning about different explosives and even doing site visits in Los Alamos, where many of the greatest scientific minds came together to help the U.S. win the war against the Axis powers during World War II. It was a surreal …
Data fidelity refers to the accuracy with which information—“data”—qualifies and demonstrates the characteristics of the origin—“source.” The emergence of artificial intelligence in data monitoring has necessitated an elevated level of accuracy.
We are discussing the specific topic of data fidelity and accuracy because of recent events surrounding the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) audits of the Social Security Administration master file, which found a significant number of presumably “deceased …
A few years ago, I visited my brother and his family while I was still in school. I had run out of cash and needed to top up before starting our end-of-semester exams. My sister-in-law, a virtuous woman well-loved in our family, invited me to join her and my brother at the wedding of one of her close friends. As we were getting ready to leave, she pulled me aside …
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Neurohospitalist and clinical neurophysiologist Franklyn Rocha Cabrero discusses the article, “Missing prescription: long-term parental leave for fathers in medicine.” In this episode, Franklyn delves into the systemic and societal barriers that hinder …
The tragic and shocking murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO has ignited a nationwide conversation about the flaws in the health care system, often accompanied by misdirected anger toward physicians. The rhetoric suggesting that physician salaries are the root of the problem oversimplifies a complex issue and distracts from systemic failures.
Physician salaries account for only about 8 percent of …
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