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Many hospital brass think error reporting is a mistake

Physician Practice Advisor, March 23, 2005

We're taught, from an early age, to 'fess up when we've made mistakes, and that honesty is the best policy. But a recent survey of hospital administrators seems to indicate that such attributes are still regarded more as detriments when it comes to the bottom line.

The Associated Press reported last week that a survey of 203 chief
executive officers and chief operating offices within the medical industry
revealed strong opposition to the nationwide move toward mandatory reporting of medical errors. The survey, published in the March 16 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, saw more than 80% of respondents opine that the identities of hospitals and doctors who commit errors should be kept confidential in any mandatory reporting system.

Close to 70% of respondents said that mandatory, non-confidential reporting of errors would make physicians and medical facilities less likely to speak up about their own mistakes, and 79% said that they thought such a reporting system would encourage more lawsuits, not fewer, although recent evidence of the success of "physician apology" would seem to contradict that.

Nearly half of the states in the union have instituted some sort of mandatory reporting system for revealing medical errors, some confidential and some not. The administrators that participated in the JAMA study were from Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

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