Sixteen years ago a bagel nearly killed me.
I was just out of college and living at my parents’ house – depressing enough to commit hari-kiri with a stale pastry, but that’s beside the point.
My brush with how the medical system can inadvertently hurt you began as I was cutting the bagel and sliced a chunk off my palm. The wound required 3 stitches.
It should have ended there, but soon after my emergency room visit I started getting sick. Very sick.
A week later – after several visits to the emergency room at 2 of the world’s finest hospitals, seeing some of the world’s finest doctors – noone could figure out what was going on in my body.
I ended up in a hospital bed with fluids and morphine pumping through me via an IV drip. The final straw for me was choking on a glass of water because a violent infection contracted in that original visit to the emergency room had basically swollen my throat shut.
The ordeal caused me 2 weeks of sheer misery, not to mention thousands of dollars in hospital bills that I had no ability to pay. But I was also very lucky.
I hadn’t thought of that episode for years until a meeting with Masimo (NSDQ:MASI) CEO Joe Kiani this fall resulted in my involvement with the inaugural Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit, which kicks off this Sunday in Laguna Beach, Calif.
Through my involvement in the conference I also learned the story of Rory Staunton, a 12-year-old boy from Queens, N.Y., who, like me, got a cut (in his case playing basketball in a school gym) and contracted an infection. However, Staunton died from sepsis after doctors at a world-renown hospital failed to put together the warning signs that a blood infection was raging inside his body. A fragmented healthcare system that acts in silos, rather than through coordination, was as responsible for the boy’s death as the blood infection.
His story has, rightfully, become a rallying cry for the medical industry, but Staunton’s is merely one of thousands of examples that are undermining the incredible efforts that are made by our 21st-century healthcare system. Some of those incidents end like mine did, but far too many end up like Rory’s and that has to stop.
In 2000 a landmark Institute of Medicine study called "To err is human" estimated that about 100,000 people die every year from medical errors. Estimates more than a decade later say the number could be twice that. The numbers are certainly stark enough but when you take just one of those stories and look at how those errors impact the patient, his/her family and the healthcare workers who are affected by it, it’s overwhelming.
Something can be done to reduce these tragic accidents, and that’s why I got MassDevice.com involved in sponsoring the Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit.
Through the summit we hope to galvanize the medical technology industry to light a spark which could one day result in the eradication of unnecessary deaths, because the only way to change something big is to start with small steps.
The 1st step is having this meeting and bringing in stakeholders from across the healthcare spectrum to find ways to collaborate on preventing the most common types of medical errors that result in patient death.
The 2nd step is getting medtech, EHR and other healthcare sectors to make a pledge to do their part in stopping these errors from happening.
Masimo’s Kiani, as we have reported, has pledged to "make the data that my company’s [produces], subject to HIPAA, available to anyone who wants to use it for the betterment of patient care."
After this weekend, I hope that other medtech companies will make their own pledges along these lines and I promise that MassDevice.com will do it’s part in making sure those contributions are recognized.
If you want to learn more about the Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit and how your company can get involved in this effort, I encourage you to visit the conference’s web site, or contact me directly at publisher@massdevice.com, because the challenge doesn’t end after this weekend. It’s just beginning.