Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, and What Can Be Done About It
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Misdiagnoses, wrong prescriptions, operating on the wrong patient, even operating on the wrong limb (and amputating it): these are the consequences of rampant carelessness, overwork, ignorance, and hospitals trying to get the most out of their caregivers and the most money out of their patients.
What are we to do? Killer Care lays out the very real danger each of us faces whenever we enter a hospital. But more than that, it spells out what we can do to mitigate that risk. The book is also the story of the remarkable heroes fighting this plague of medical errors—patients and their families, but also doctors and nurses. Starting about twenty years ago, a number of victims and even some perpetrators of these errors began a social movement that offers us vital protections when we are most vulnerable: they have begun a cultural shift that is transforming every facet of health care.
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Killer Care - James B. Lieber
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INTRODUCTION: Full Disclosure
Like most Americans, I love and fear health care. With age, this fear increases. In fact, it increases reasonably. The old—I am 66—and the very young are more likely than other patients to suffer medical errors, including fatal ones.
I have a rare condition caused by a genetic mutation that puts me at risk of blood clots and stroke. A few years ago, when I was highly symptomatic, in great pain, and walking with difficulty, a doctor diagnosed this malady, which soon was confirmed by a blood test. I started taking a maintenance dose of oral chemotherapy, put aside my cane, and returned to a normal pain-free life with mobility.
A month before the accurate diagnosis, I had gone to an emergency room because of a gangrenous blackness on my foot and fear of a clot. The emergency physician wanted to admit me, and bring in a vascular surgeon to assess severing my toes. At this point, my family physician and a close friend appeared. With his backing I exercised the patient’s essential right to say no, left the hospital, and saw a series of specialists, one of whom finally got it right.
Had my toes been amputated, I would have joined the ranks of those who have received wrong site, wrong limb, wrong organ, and other unnecessary surgeries known as never events,
because the medical profession admits that they never should have happened. Error specialists, and there are many, might say that I had a near miss,
something health care is just beginning to study and learn from following the example of the aviation industry.
I was fortunate, but others among my family and friends have not been so lucky. In her twenties, my future wife underwent an unneeded colonoscopy on a distressed and inflamed gut. The probe perforated her colon. This led to emergency surgery to save her life, a temporary colostomy, and subsequent surgeries to repair her intestine and remove the colostomy. She recovered fully, but went through a year of health-care hell. She endured an overtreatment
error from an unnecessary procedure. As Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and chief medical correspondent for CNN, recently put it, More treatment, more mistakes.
My father’s later years were marred by a hospital-acquired infection
(HAI) that he apparently contracted during a minor knee-draining procedure. My mother endured a hand-off
error following surgery for a nonmalignant brain tumor. Because physicians failed to order anti-seizure medication, she convulsed and entered a coma for three weeks, from which she emerged a hemiplegic with limited speech. My close friend, the family practitioner who helped me avoid unnecessary foot surgery, saw his elderly mother enter but not leave the excellent teaching hospital where he serves on the staff. During routine cataract surgery, she suffered an anesthesia error, aspirated vomit, and died. My professional mentor, Byrd Brown, Pittsburgh’s preeminent civil rights attorney, had a lung transplant at age 70. During the post-surgical hand-off, his attending physician ordered a necessary but highly toxic anti-rejection drug. A misplaced decimal point meant that my very sick colleague received ten times the intended dose. It killed him. A lethal prescription is regarded as a medication error.
Two of those situations led to medical malpractice claims that yielded settlements: one low and one moderate. I cannot say more because as in most civil tort claims, the eventual settlement and release documents contained clauses forever binding those involved to secrecy, which helps to resolve these grief-driven contests and soothes some of the suffering and loss with compensation, As controversial as they are common, such gag orders stop the public, patients, and health providers from learning as much as they might about medical accidents, and hopefully preventing them in the future.
Over four decades, I have pursued dual careers in law and writing. As an attorney I have concentrated on civil rights, employment, and business cases. Early on I was involved in a support role in a single medical malpractice case. A young couple sought genetic counseling at a world-renowned academic medical center in the South. Their first child had been stillborn and severely deformed. They wondered if they should attempt another pregnancy. They had excellent government insurance that covered this type of service because the husband was an active-duty soldier.
The geneticist who read the x-ray photomicrography of their chromosomes called a karyotype said that they were normal, healthy, and not at any greater risk than others. They conceived again, but this time the child was born alive, with major developmental defects that would require a lifetime of expensive care. It turned out that the geneticist misread their chromosomes. Prior to this he had analyzed only karyotypes of drosophila (fruit flies), not humans. Victims like these cannot be made whole in court and only rarely is their suffering fairly compensated, but this jury returned a large measure of damages to pay for the child’s care. Again, I cannot say more because the case was resolved in such a way that the hospital decided not to appeal, and the family and its lawyers promised confidentiality. Nevertheless, everyone in and around this case learned a profound lesson about medical errors that has been vindicated by data: experience matters. Whether you are a patient in need of a lung transplant or merely seeking to have an x-ray read accurately, it makes total sense to pick a provider who has completed the task successfully many times before.
Of course, the vast majority of medical mistakes do not lead to lawsuits. However, the experiences just in my personal circle seem fairly typical. Medical errors touch many lives and frighten most of us. Almost everyone knows someone who has emerged from a hospital with an infection, or has read an obituary noting that a person died from complications
—often a code word for medical error. A recent Consumer Reports poll found that 80 percent of hospital patients feared infections, and 65 percent were afraid of surgical error.
In 1999, the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences’ book-length report To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System announced that 44,000 to 98,000 Americans died from medical errors annually, far exceeding the tolls from gun violence, suicide, AIDS, breast cancer, or automobile accidents. Commentators equated the carnage from health-care errors with the daily crash of a jumbo jet. This stark image produced some public attention, as did the IOM’s call to halve these errors within five years, which was not to be. Now, To Err is Human’s statistics are regarded as conservative. Medical errors are a man-made epidemic, and it may be that only heart disease and cancer kill more of us.
In my career as an employment lawyer, I have represented many doctors, nurses, and other providers. This seems natural given that health care has swelled to over 22 percent of the economy. As a $2.7 trillion business, it impacts us all. Virtually everyone interfaces with the system as a patient, provider, payee, payor, family member, advocate, or friend. In terms of major medical interventions, the average American undergoes nine surgeries in a lifetime.
Doctors, nurses, and other medical staff must navigate an increasingly bureaucratic, technologically evolving, cost-driven, and chaotically managed environment where they win and lose positions in practices that can be bought, sold, or shunned by hospitals, which may themselves be folded into, spun out of, or shuttered by regional health-care systems. Funding for research to improve medical knowledge and safety, especially from the government, is entirely uncertain in an era of bean counting and fiscal cliffs.
One of my legal areas that has been an important window into error involves defending research doctors accused of scientific misconduct, which can result in their debarment from federal funds including millions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) supporting clinical studies and laboratories. These cases can lead to administrative trials before juries of scientists resulting in verdicts that can end brilliant careers in the fight against disease. Typically these clients have been the leaders of lengthy studies involving hundreds of patients and huge accumulations of information. Somehow, a data point has been lost or put in the wrong spot in a table or on a graph, or cannot be sourced. No patient has been harmed, but questions arise about the efficacy of potential or existing treatments. My cases have involved breast cancer, lead poisoning, and lupus, and included researchers who made mistakes rather than lied. At bottom, we often have understood that the errors emanated from communication flaws (teamwork errors
) in the lab or clinic that plague medicine but usually can be corrected. Also, sometimes personalities get in the way. Jealousies, ambitions, and bruised egos have led to cases, as on occasion have the habits and idiosyncrasies of very bright people who want to perform tasks their way rather than according to established standards and best practices.
As a writer, my assignments and storylines have involved assessing large industries. Some of these have included steel, agribusiness, finance, law enforcement, corrections, and health care, where in particular I have delved into fertility treatments and drug addiction. To my thinking, the best book on safety in modern industry is Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1965). In many ways, the mighty American car industry of the 1960s dominated by General Motors foreshadowed the health-care colossus of today. Our postwar car industry was the biggest in the world. It had no real foreign competition, at least not domestically. It had expanded so radically, and offered so many products at so many quality and price points that just about anyone in the era of President Johnson’s Great Society could gain access to some kind of vehicle. It knew about safety and design problems that led to tens of thousands of deaths. Nader was particularly enraged about the skewed suspension on the Chevrolet Corvair that caused the popular inexpensive sporty vehicle to flip while turning corners.
Today, with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare
), Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Health Care, private insurance, emergency rooms, and nontraditional options, just about every American can find some sort of health care, although the quality varies dramatically. Like the auto industry of half a century ago, medicine also knows that its flaws cause thousands of unnecessary deaths plus untold suffering and loss of function.
But the industries also differ. In Detroit’s heyday, the car business was famously concentrated and dominated by the Big Three
—GM, Ford, and Chrysler. While health care is experiencing mergers and (in some places) local monopolies, it remains a diverse, regional, and highly balkanized business. There is no Detroit of health care.
As Nader found, the leaders of GM cared little about consumers and much less about safety. The near total focus was on profits. However, doctors, nurses, and other providers are more humane. In the main, they care about their patients, want them to do well, and actually do not want them to suffer or die, yet they are killing them daily by the planeload. The motto of the profession, and perhaps the most famous tagline of any trade, is: First, do no harm.
Attributed to Hippocrates, a physician and contemporary of Plato, who worked and trained students on the Greek islands of Cos and Delos four centuries before Christ, we know little about him—or rather them—since the Hippocratic collection of over 60 volumes came out over about two hundred years.
Regardless, the statement which may have meant not to perform wild, unjustified surgeries or drug therapies on patients certainly compares favorably to the most famous phrase of my profession: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,
which always brings down the house when Dick the Butcher bruits it in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2. Still, the Hippocratic Oath is seen by modern doctors and others such as naturopaths as promoting a careful holistic approach to the patient. Recited at medical school graduations, it is displayed prominently on the cover of the IOM report To Err is Human.
But the key distinction between the auto industry and health care is in their consumers. Drivers for the most part are relatively healthy, intact, and free to stop or go as they please. Patients make their journeys in weakened, confused, confined, and nearly naked states that make them utterly dependent on and vulnerable to their medical masters, the best of whom increasingly recognize that their positions of power entail heightened vigilance and protection against errors that nullify treatments and ruin lives. This concern is largely a development of the late twentieth century.
Medical errors always have been with us. As Voltaire wrote in Candide (1759), Despite the attention and ministrations of the leading medical doctors in Europe, he survived.
But the profession tended to ignore or gloss over its flaws and mishaps. The standard medical histories pay scant heed to errors. Rather, they recount the astonishing triumphs of geniuses and heroes over plague, leprosy, typhus, cholera, malaria, polio, smallpox, heart disease, cancer, AIDS, and other decimating illnesses while spending only a handful of pages on iatrogenic (meaning caused by errors in treatment or examination) disasters such as Thalidomide, the supposed safe replacement for barbiturates that when taken in pregnancy stunted the development of children’s limbs. But common medical errors in the hospital and clinical practice remained very much under the radar until the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era.
For most of the twentieth century, Americans lived in a Norman Rockwell, Marcus Welby haze about medicine. Doctors were wise and respected. Hospitals were thought to be clean, quiet, safe, and well-equipped, well-intentioned charitable organizations. No one expected to be the victim of an error. Emergency rooms all were ready, able, and equal. We picked them by proximity. Every medical school was thought to be excellent.
In Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader tried to launch a new idea called body rights,
meaning that people should be secure against callous corporate policies leading to personal mayhem. The term has all but died; however, the concept suddenly seems reborn in certain corners of health care. You have experienced it in a hospital or clinical office setting when doctors and nurses scrub their hands before and after they touch patients. The reason is of course to stop the spread of infection. When you are asked by staff to repeat your name and date of birth, the reason is to prevent them from medicating or operating on the wrong person. When consulting a doctor and afterwards she dictates in front of you, it is so you will correct her if she notes a lesion on your left arm when it is actually on your right, or she says that you take twenty milligrams of a drug when you know it is twenty-five. Hospital visiting hours no longer are limited. A parent, spouse, or sibling of a child or incapacitated person can stay overnight. The core reason is not to make the patient more comfortable, though that is part of it, but rather to have familiar eyes and ears in the room that can insist on aid when doctors or nurses are not comprehending a subtle yet negative change. Patients are given satisfaction surveys to fill out about the quality of their care, including the courteousness of nurses, the cleanliness of rooms, the management of pain, the prevention of bedsores, and even whether they were toileted adequately. Then the results are converted to graphs over time and posted prominently. These are nothing less than the outward manifestations of a revolution that is occurring right now.
What sparked that revolution? The simple answer is cases that shocked the public, expanded the consciousness of the medical professions, and even penetrated the budget-hardened brains of hospital administrators. As in most revolutions or the civil rights movement, some people had to stand up against grievous errors, and other people were damaged or died from them. In varying measures we are reaping the benefits of their sacrifices today. Like art history, medical history is a form of social history. To look into it is to perceive our values as a culture during times of tension and change.
This book can be read straight through to see how the sudden focus on tragedies in the late twentieth century led to the reforms of today, or consumers can pick out areas of particular interest. I recommend anyone about to go into a hospital or long-term care facility read Chapter Ten, Centuries of Hospital Infections,
and Chapter Eleven on bedsores and blood clots, which are serious and sometimes fatal errors. Seniors might benefit from Chapter Twelve on falls and delirium. If you plan on taking prescriptions or over-the-counter remedies, Chapter Eight, The Needless Prevalence of Medication Errors
is intended to keep you safer. In order to fathom the politics of medical errors and how special interests bend market forces, Chapter Nine, The Dream and Tragedy of Electronic Medical Records
describes a major domestic scandal of the Obama Administration, and, yes, people may die as a result. To learn how one big state decreased serious medical errors with a comprehensive, cost-effective mistake reporting plan see Chapter Fourteen, The Health-Care Environment Should be Open and Overseen,
which suggests how such a system could be extended nationally plus produce funds for Medicare.
Obviously I am not a doctor or nurse; some medical professionals spoke with me while others declined perhaps because they had a good reason: talk is cheap in health care, but as in law, evidence is real, even compelling. In medicine, data is amassed at great cost, and usually from numerous patients over long periods in formal research that seldom makes news unless it puts a disease on the path to cure or takes a drug off the market. Studies of medical errors—and by now there are thousands—almost never penetrate mass media. Any mistakes that I made in selecting or interpreting research are purely my own.
Due to spatial constraints and my limited knowledge, this book cannot be a comprehensive treatment of its subject. It is simply the attempt of one worried citizen and impatient future patient to shine a light on a horrific social problem that touches everyone.
—James B. Lieber
Pittsburgh, PA.
June 15, 2015
CHAPTER ONE: Mediagenic Cases
In the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, a series of medical errors captured public attention and drove change in unprecedented ways. It was a time—perhaps the last time—of powerful investigative media, especially daily newspapers that combed courthouses for stories of medical malpractice and did not simply report initial filings or final verdicts. Moreover, the victims, their families, and advocates exhibited a newfound tenacity in terms that went beyond their own struggles and spread into a quest for broader deterrence and reform. Inside health care, these epic battles are known as the mediagenic cases.
Ironically, the cases that changed medicine—and finally riveted the nation’s attention on medical error—sometimes involved journalists. The first was Sidney Zion, a swaggering New York Daily News columnist and former federal prosecutor known for exposés of the mob, a biography of McCarthy-era lawyer Roy Cohn, and for revealing the identity of Daniel Ellsberg, who covertly released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post. On Sunday evening, March 4, 1984, his eighteen-year-old daughter Libby, a Bennington College freshman with a mass of dark curls, taxied to the emergency room at well-regarded New York Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Her symptoms included a 102-degree fever and mysterious jerking movements. In recent days Libby, who was doing a work-study project in city government, had had a tooth extracted and a cold. She had prescriptions for antibiotics and Percodan for pain. Since January, she had taken Nardil for depression.
The two physicians on duty, Dr. Luise Weinstein (an intern who had graduated from medical school eight months before) and Dr. Gregg Stone (a second-year resident) also covered forty other patients. After consulting with the Zion family physician, Dr. Raymond Sherman, they admitted the young woman for hydration and observation. Libby was not entirely coherent and received a loose provisional diagnosis of viral syndrome with hysterical symptoms.
With Sherman’s approval, the trainee doctors ordered an injection of meperidine, an opiate sedative, to try to quell her jerking. Then the intern and resident intermittently spent about two hours with her, until Stone went across the street to the hospital’s sleeping quarters to nap. Weinstein concentrated on the other patients. Around three in the morning, a nurse called her to report that Libby was trying to yank her tubes out. Weinstein ordered restraints and a shot of haloperidol, an antipsychotic. Libby slept, but at dawn her fever surged to 107 degrees, she went into cardiac arrest, and died.
Weinstein called the family. She and the hospital took the position that the young woman had a bad outcome
from a strange and unknown infection. Soon it became known that mixing the dying woman’s antidepressant Nardil (phenelzine) with Demerol (meperidine hydrochloride, an anti-spasmodic and painkiller) could trigger a fatal drug interaction.
Sidney Zion’s rage was towering, his grief bottomless, and his connections legendary. Murder
was how he described his daughter’s demise: They gave her a drug that was destined to kill her, then ignored her except to tie her down like a dog.
He lacerated the venerable hospital for the hazing of residents that forced them to work for days at a clip and sometimes over a hundred hours per week. You don’t need kindergarten,
he inveighed in a New York Times op-ed piece, to know that a resident working a 36-hour shift is in no condition to make any kind of judgment call—forget about life and death.
Zion implored his friend, Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, to indict the hospital and doctors for homicide. In 1986, Morgenthau convened a grand jury. It failed to indict for homicide, but issued an extraordinary report—truly a seminal document in the fight against medical errors—scoring the supervision of interns and residents in New York County.
Although it failed to find probable cause for homicide, the grand jury charged a host of errors ranging from callously prescribing interactive drugs to not ordering necessary tests. Under New York’s labyrinthine procedure, these allegations shuttled to the State Board for Professional Medical Conduct, which held thirty hearings before passing the ball to the Board of Regents, which censured the family doctor, resident, and intern for gross negligence, but did not lift their licenses to practice. The hospital paid a $13,000 fine for inadequate care.
Profoundly dissatisfied, Zion and his wife Elsa, a former publishing executive and New York City elder care manager, redoubled their drive for justice and reforms. They engaged four lawyers and filed a lawsuit for malpractice and wrongful death against the hospital and its doctors that ran for almost three months in the winter of 1994–1995 and was covered by Court TV. The defense hammered the victim. Dead for a decade, Libby could not rebut claims of cocaine use. The court found Sherman, Stone, and Weinstein liable, cleared the hospital, and returned a modest judgment to the Zions of $375,000 for pain and suffering, $1 for wrongful death, and zero for punitive damages.
For the Zions, it was a bitter disappointment. Once malpractice cases go to trial, only about 2 to 5 percent result in verdicts against physicians, so the Zions had beaten the odds. Clearly the compensation had not worked out. It amounted to a paltry fraction of the worth of the dead woman’s normal remaining adult life. The blame-the-victim strategy had succeeded as often occurs in preventing the deceased from being made whole or even from receiving a credible compromise. At the interface of medicine and law, justice often gets lost.
But the Zions pressed on, working for changes in the law and keeping the issues of overworked, undisciplined, and poorly-supervised junior physicians in the spotlight. TV’s 60 Minutes ran a segment on the problem. A fatigued resident, up for days, seemed to have trouble following much less answering Mike Wallace’s