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| You already know that people spend less time selecting the right doctor or hospital than they do selecting a car or a vacuum cleaner. It isn’t that medicine is too complicated for lay people to understand - it's just that there is much less quality information out there to properly evaluate the options. And which information among those choices do you rely upon?
Is it good enough that your doctor is board certified? A newspaper advertisement brags that your hospital is accredited by JCAHO – what does that mean? In short, the obvious question that has never been properly answered until now has been: who says my doctor's OK? Welcome to WHO SAYS YOUR DOCTOR'S OK? We’ve created this site to answer that very question. Or, to put it differently: "what information can I trust to help me make health care decisions? How do I judge the jury?" The answers may surprise you. The fact is, when the data are good, they’re very good. Their impacts can be profound. Just three years after New York began to publish heart surgery death rates for every heart surgeon in the state by name, those rates dropped by more than 40%. But too often, the data aren't very good at all. The Chicago Tribune reports that the federally-mandated Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) has documented just 12 cases of preventable death due to hospital-borne infections since 1995 - yet state and government files indicate that the actual number of preventable hospital-borne infection deaths for a single year is closer to 75,000. Even so, JCAHO data are the foundation for determining hospital eligibility for Medicare reimbursement. These are just two of the many examples you'll find here at WHO SAYS. Our goal is to create a better educated health care consumer, and in so doing set the groundwork for a better health care system. Again, welcome to WHO SAYS. |
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