Beth Israel CEO: Boston hospitals are killing patients

Beth Israel Deaconess CEO Paul Levy, who has long publicly chronicled Beth Israel Deaconess's efforts to reduce infections among patients with tubes going right into the chests for medications, reports on the reaction when he called on other area hospitals, insurers and doctors to develop a formal program to fight these often fatal ailments: Complete silence.

... [Y]esterday, a world expert in this field, whose wisdom and advice I treasure, told me that he has come to accept gradual progress in quality and safety improvement, citing the kind of training doctors get, which does not emphasize these areas. That such a person has become content with gradual changes in the status quo is an indication of what it must be like to beat your head against this wall of recalcitrance for several decades.

My advantage, being without medical training and having had but a short tenure in this field, is that I retain a sense of outrage. Our collective failure to approach this problem using well established methods of process improvement -- including publication of current performance results -- represents a moral and ethical lapse by the clinical and administrative leadership of the medical establishment in this city. Why? Simply put, a profession that takes an oath to do no harm is, by inaction or incomplete action, doing harm. We are causing people to die who should not die. What would we call that if we saw it happening in other sectors of society?