BY KIM BELLARD

It’s a lot more fun to write about exciting new technologies, or companies in other industries that healthcare could learn from, than to pick on healthcare for its many, well-known shortcomings, but there was an article in JAMA Forum last week that I had to note and perhaps expand on: A New Category of “Never Events” – Ending Harmful Hospital Policies, by  Dave A. Chokshi, MD, MSc and Adam L. Beckman, BS (he is also an MD/MBA student).  

The concept of a “Never Event” is well known by this point.  Coined some twenty years ago by Ken Kizer, MD of the National Quality Form (NQF) and soon widely adopted and expanded, it recognizes that healthcare sometimes has egregious errors that shouldn’t happen:  the wrong foot is amputated, the wrong drug/dosage is given, surgical instruments are left inside a patient, and so on.  Organizations like The Leapfrog Group exist largely to try to measure and compare hospitals on such patient safety issues.