Wednesday, September 11, 2013

A response to a question...

posed by Nick Budnick in comments on Oregon's new medical mediation law helps bad doctors, national group says

The story is about how Public Citizen is critical of a Disclose and Compensate tort reform program Oregon enacted earlier this year.  The question asked how to weigh the potential loss of reporting of some incidents to the National Practitioner Data Bank(NPDB) state medical board as a result of them being settled through mediation. [alas, I misunderstood the question!]  My response:


Public access to the NPDB doesn't include names of physicians.  Access to that information is generally restricted to hospitals  and credentialing organizations.  Given that, I wouldn't call those reports "public information."  Weighing their value requires knowing how those reports get used in real life, and I don't know that (maybe a future story?)

But I'll speculate that how those reports get used is on second hand decisions:  Should we renew so and so's credentials?  Should we revoke them?  Should we hire or grant privileges?  Except for the case where a facility is reviewing an incident which happened on their premises (and in that case they shouldn't need an NPDB report to tell them what happened)  none of those decisions can influence the process that lead to error, assuming there was one.  They are go / no-go decisions about a specific person and they only effect errors to the extent those individuals are personally responsible for them.

There are really bad doctors and having a process that can get rid of them is a good thing.  But most doctors aren't really bad and most adverse events aren't attributable to a single individual.  Keying off Merwin's comment below most doctors are neither superheroes nor super villains, they're regular people typically working in complicated, interdependent systems.  A malpractice monitoring system that only catches super villains isn't that helpful.

Consider some statistics.  Over the last 10 years there were on average 14,787 medical malpractice payments reported to the NPDB each year.  For the sake of argument let's suppose each and every one of those involved a death.  Well, the IOM estimates there are 44,000 preventable deaths caused by medical errors each year, just in hospitals.  So even using charitable assumptions there are two preventable deaths outside the NPDB system for every one that makes it in.  And when you use less favorable assumptions- fewer than a third of NPBD med mal payments involve a fatality and estimates of preventable deaths due to error go much higher- it's clear that the world outside the NPBD system is  a lot bigger and no less consequential than the world inside it.

Oregon's reform is an acknowledgment of that reality, and intended to encourage institutions to dig deeper into adverse events to better understand why they happened and prevent their recurrence.  It's meant to impact the broad middle ground where most practice is, not the narrow extreme.  And where a provider is at the extreme you have to consider the chance they wouldn't resolve in mediation and they'd get reported to the NPDB anyway.

Opinions will vary, but to me the NPDB issue looks like a small cost for a potentially large gain in patient safety.  I'm surprised and disappointed Public Citizen objects to that.

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