My "2 cents" on healthcare...as a traveler

Probably the most frequent question friends and family ask me about my job is "doesn't it make you nervous flying so much?"  My answer?  "Flying is a whole lot safer than being a patient in a hospital." 


I heard this comparison recently - if airline quality was the same as hospital quality, there would be a 747 airline crash EVERY WEEK!

There have been numerous publications since 1999 focusing on the subject of preventable deaths in hospitals.  The Institute of Medicine's "To Err is Human"  raised a lot of awareness about this issue.

11 years later (Feb 2010) an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine reports that from 1998 to 2006, 48,000 patients died from hospital-acquired pneumonia or sepsis, at a cost of $8.1billion.
If my math is correct, that puts the risk of dying at
-1 in 1437 if you're in a hospital (and that's just for the 2 conditions mentioned in the article)
-1 in 11,000,000 for air travel (if you fly one of the top 25 safest airlines vs. 1 in 724,000 for worst 25)
-1 in 8000 for auto travel (or 1 in 12,300 depending on which reference you use).
Note:   I googled the "odds of dying" and I want to stress that I found varying numbers, so please keep that in mind!!  The healthcare ones I could source.

Enough statistics.  Hopefully you can understand why, if I was concerned at all about traveling, my concern would be which  hospital I would wind up in should I have an accident or become ill and not have a say in the matter.

I travel coast to coast consulting in hospitals.  I'm still seeing some that are very resistant to performance measurement.  Many have the mindset that local differences justify their average or "worse than expected" outcomes.   I hear things like:
-our patients are different
-all of our patients are fat
-all of our patients smoke
-all of our patients are non-compliant (ie its not our fault)
-if we force doctors to standardize care, they'll take their business elsewhere
-our doctors are different (a recent comment was "our doctors are cowboys - they do what they want")

One doctor said to me "we aren't interested in state-of-the-art healthcare" - to which I replied "then you need to put a billboard outside the hospital that says...If you're interested in state-of-the-art healthcare, keep driving...... so that consumers, including travelers like me, can make an informed choice."

So my "2 cents"....I think Americans should be able to make informed decisions about which doctors and which hospitals to go to for healthcare services.  As it stand today, you can look up the "lost luggage" stats on airlines, but not much data on healthcare quality.  Medicare has a website http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/ that contains some hospital data. Though its pretty minimal in terms of content so far, it is getting the attention of hospital administrators who don't want their hospitals to look bad. (its data specific to Medicare patients).  Some states also publish hospital data (google Pennsylvania Healthcare Cost Containment Council).
Try finding outcome and volume (ie "how many times have you done this?") information about physicians. 

There are many things to debate regarding what is taking place in Washington but it seems to me that improving hospital safety and quality should be a big priority as it would be a great way to reduce costs and save lives.  In the meantime, Washington is spending a lot of time and money on the Toyota issue (48 deaths?) while thousands of preventable deaths occur in hospitals every year.  Does this make sense? 

My advice..."shop" carefully for healthcare services.