Bad Medicine, Part 3, Death By Diagnosis

Excerpt "I think the number-one problem is we don’t measure performance. We don’t measure the outcomes of patients in health care for 99 percent of the health care that’s delivered. Ninety-nine percent of people that have surgery in the United States go home and no one documents or keeps track at a systematic level — that is, national or regional, or hospital — how the patient does. At six months, are you glad that you had your knee surgery done? At six months after hip surgery, are you walking again? Or a year after weight-loss surgery, what is your weight today? We don’t keep track of those things for most of the procedures that we do. How can you really come up with a quality metric if nobody’s tracking it?"

Dr Marty Makary, Surgeon and Professor Healthcare Policy read more