Unaccountable
What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care
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New York Times Bestseller
"Every once in a while a book comes along that rocks the foundations of an established order that's seriously in need of being shaken. The modern American hospital is that establishment and Unaccountable is that book."-Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated
Dr. Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined in Atul Gawande's bestselling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy surgeon who has worked in many of the best hospitals in the nation, he can testify to the amazing power of modern medicine to cure. But he's also been a witness to a medical culture that routinely leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limbs, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting.
Over the last ten years, neither error rates nor costs have come down, despite scientific progress and efforts to curb expenses. Why? To patients, the healthcare system is a black box. Doctors and hospitals are unaccountable, and the lack of transparency leaves both bad doctors and systemic flaws unchecked. Patients need to know more of what healthcare workers know, so they can make informed choices. Accountability in healthcare would expose dangerous doctors, reward good performance, and force positive change nationally, using the power of the free market.
Unaccountable is a powerful, no-nonsense, non-partisan diagnosis for healing our hospitals and reforming our broken healthcare system.
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We demand accountability from Wall Street and the White House, yet are shockingly reluctant to demand it from our hospitals, laments Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor of health policy, in this urgent call for doctors and hospital administrators to ditch their dangerous culture of secrecy. Lifting the veil on the existing wealth of data from hundreds of hospitals' rates of infections, surgical complications, and other negative patient outcomes, he argues that making those statistics public would force low performers to fix their problems and compete far more effectively rather than waste money on ad campaigns. Moreover, every patient should routinely be able to see a hospital's re-admission rate; its surgical or treatment complication rates; its "never happen" events, like surgery on the wrong side of a patient; its safety-survey scores from its own workers; its volume of operations and treatments; and its programs to streamline access to patient records. For a noteworthy example, Makary dishes that one patient boasted that his surgeon operated on President Reagan but had no clue Reagan suffered from complications caused by an improperly placed central-line for IV fluids and medication. This thought-provoking guide from a leader in the field is a must-read for M.D.s, and an eye-opener for the rest of us.
