Health screwups

The evidence is necessarily scanty, but the (US) Institute of Medicine in 1999 estimated (pdf) that at least 44 000 and perhaps as many as 98 000 citizens died each year in US hospitals and 1 million patients were injured from a range of mistakes. Since then, according to Joe and Teresa Graedon, there has been little, if any, improvement.

If medical mistakes and misadventures were a disease, there would be a great deal of hand wringing. We would have an organization comparable to the American Heart Association or the American Cancer Society to publicize the problem, and huge sums of tax dollars would be spent researching the causes and seeking solutions to all these screwups. Instead, the medical establishment mostly acts as if this problem were invisible. Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them, Joe Graedon and Teresa Graedon, 2011

My own view is that resources for health care are rarely allocated in ways that optimize returns. It might be that, as I suspect, efficiency counts for little against the charisma or leverage of top specialists, interest groups and celebrities when it comes to deciding which diseases, for instance, shall receive most funding. Or whether preventive medicine should receive more funding. Or, indeed, whether the most efficient ways of improving a population's health have less to do with medicine, and more to do with, as the Graedons persuasively suggest, introducing check lists and rigorous procedures in healthcare facilities. It's only a suspicion, but the point is that there are no incentives in place for people to find out whether it's true.

Applying the Social Policy Bond principle to health might be the solution. To 'health', note, not 'health care'. Why? Because health is not something that arises mainly, or even primarily, from the decisions made by institutions devoted to health care. It may well be the case that relatively costless changes in diet, exercise, tobacco consumption or (one of my pet hates) the frequency and volume at which emergency vehicle sirens are played would do more for health than, say, investments in statins or new technology. As with exposing and tackling the 'screwups' identified by the Graedons, there are no incentives for anyone to find all this out. Instead we have organizations, such as hospitals, health services, charities, interest groups, and corporations which all have their own agendas which might at times coincide with improving the health of the population, but might not, and even if they did, would not necessarily be doing so efficiently. The human and financial costs of such resource misallocation are huge. The Social Policy Bond concept applied to health, by targeting and rewarding improvements in the population's health, however achieved, might be the solution.