In the last week I wrote about our quality improvement, or QI, efforts in healthcare. And although there is a burgeoning field representing itself as the "science" of QI, I question much of its scientific validity. As always, VAP is my poster child for these discussions, where neither the definition of the condition itself nor its prevention efforts are subject to much scientific scrutiny. This makes VAP have a surreal, ghost-like quality: now you...
Friday, 29 July 2011
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Health surveys: Run the other way!!!
Sometimes when I get an unsolicited call about answering survey questions, I feel a karmic obligation to participate; after all, if everyone said no to everything, I would not have any data to analyze. So, for this very reason, I just got off the phone with a poor young woman conducting a survey who called me randomly. The survey had to do with healthcare delivery, and she had no idea what she was getting herself into. First, I queried her whom the...
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
Tipping a sacred cow: QI under the microscope
So much media and journal space has been devoted to financial conflicts of interest, particularly within and related to pharma and device manufacturers, that to write any more about it may be redundant. On this site we have also intermittently addressed COI from other perspectives, such as financial interest of the members of the American College of Radiology in maintaining mammography screening status quo, thinly veiled in its own version of the...
Friday, 22 July 2011
Whose perspective?
After a long hiatus filled with travel, work and lack of inspiration to write anything, I have chosen this arguably hottest day of the year to venture forth again. But I will make this brief, as it seems that everything that needs to be thought and said has already been thought and said. Yet who is listening?Anyhow, to suspend my natural cynicism,...
