healthcare

I only watched part one of Remaking American Healthcare, mostly because I forgot to TiVo the rest. That one episode was enough, though. It discussed MRSA, which is an antibiotic resistant bacterium, often spread in hospitals. The episode detailed how one city was working with its hospitals to resolve the problem of spreading infections, and how they were running into obstacles, because 1. hospitals were in competition with each other, 2. didn't want to share information that would leave them liable, 3. didn't share information with each other when patients were transferred from hospital to hospital, 4. they weren't paid to prevent infection, 5. didn't want to increase spending on preventing infections until they were shown that it would be more expensive not to. It was pretty appalling.

From Rebecca's Pocket, she linked to another article about how Europe is being proactive about preventing MRSA infections and the US is not.

The second part of the episode detailed how medical errors, such as transcribing a doctor's prescription incorrectly, were leading to patient suffering and death, and attempts to reduce their errors by using computers. As expected, changing the doctors' ingrained habits proved harder than just installing the software itself.