The health care industry needs to adopt and adapt some of the business world's quality control programs. We engaged in re-engineering. Sometimes the medical community has been slow to adopt business practices that have been demonstrated to be successful. It involves every employee and lots of investment and training, but it pays big dividends. We need a system for resolving patient error cases that is people-friendly.
Litigation only addresses a certain error in a certain place at a certain time.
It doesn't foster a long-term solution, a reordering of the circumstances that led to the error in the first place. That means the collection and analysis of data relating to potentially actionable instances of human error. I'm talking about the Birth Injury Fund, which has been in the news recently. This little-known program provides lifetime care for people who are severely injured during birth, provided they waive their option to sue the medical community. Nevertheless, any legislation to protect the medical community while also allowing for data collection would have to be carefully written.