Hospitals Argue That More Transparency On Medical Errors Will Decrease Dialogue On Fixing Them

from the uh,-what? dept

Tim O'Reilly points us to a bizarre story about how some hospital and medical officials in both Canada and Denmark are fighting against efforts to make data on medical errors more open to the public because it might "decrease frank and open dialogue" about how to correct those errors.
Huh?

This makes absolutely no sense, and seems to be one of those things that people say when they have no good excuse for stifling the free flow of information, but figure that if they just answer the question with complete nonsense, maybe it'll take time for people to realize it's nonsense, and everyone can move on:

Health Minister Deb Matthews has defended the move to exempt information related to quality of care from public release. According to the Free Press, Matthews believes subjecting hospitals and doctors to greater scrutiny would prevent open dialogue about problems and how to fix them. “They must have a very open and frank discussion,” she said.

Of course, there are situations in which you could see certain types of information being revealed might hold back open discussion... but how is that true here? If anything, it seems likely that the reverse would be happening here. Keeping this kind of data private is how you avoid having to have those "frank and open dialogues" about fixing the problems. It's how you sweep the problems under the rug and pretend they don't exist.

As the author of the linked blog post, Paul Levy, notes:

It is time for health care professionals to understand that patients can be trusted to be active partners in process improvement. Disclosure of clinical outcomes is a first and necessary step along that path.

Filed Under: healthcare, hospitals, medical data, transparency