In October of this year, Dr. Marty Makary, MD, MPH, FACS will be speaking at the OR Excellence conference in New Orleans. Dr. Makary, an associate professor of surgery and health policy at Johns Hopkins University Hospital has a lot to say about the fundamental problems with health care today and what can be done to improve its quality while reducing errors and complications.
OR Excellence recently published a very interesting interview with Dr. Makary entitled Shining a Bright Light on What’s Wrong with Health Care. In this interview, Dr. Makary reveals what he sees as the fundamental problems in the system as it stands today and offers suggestions about how these problems can be alleviated.
This interview provides a bit of insight to what Mr. Makary has to say. Hopefully, someone on your team can attend the conference to learn more.
As we all know, tissue damage from hypoxic ischemic injury during a heart attack leads to ongoing problems, like congestive heart failure. Once heart muscle is damaged, neighboring healthy tissue will become damaged too, due to the “bystander effect.” This can turn what might be relatively minor heart damage into major, life-threatening damage. So the question becomes: is it possible to stop this “bystander effect” in its tracks?
With more than 35 new ASCs opening in the first quarter of 2018, business continues to boom for many ambulatory surgery centers across the nation. But, some states are more favorable than others when it comes to where ASC doctors choose to practice medicine.
Those in the surgical arena are likely aware of the recent propofol shortage. This resulted when Teva Pharmaceuticals, which supplied approximately 40% of the propofol used in the U.S. announced that they would no longer produce the drug. This decision came after they were ordered to pay $356 million to a patient who developed Hepatitis C after his doctor reused the same single-use vial on several different patients. You can read about that controversial decision as well as the resultant drug shortage at the in this article at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Because the propofol vials are designed for single use only, disposing of unused medication led to a great deal of waste, particularly in ambulatory surgical centers where surgeries tend to be of a shorter duration and less of the drug is therefore needed. David Bernard, of Outpatient Surgery Magazine, reports that in response to this problem, German drug manufacturer Fresenius Kabi is now offering Diprivan, its injectable emulsion of propofol, in 10mL vials, the smallest dosage of single-use vial ever created. In addition to eliminating waste, this smaller dosage vial is likely to reduce the chances of patients being infected due to reuse.
