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May 17, 2008 -- 10:50pm EDT

Obama and Clinton Agree
A major story in tomorrow's New York Times, titled "Doctors Start to Say 'I'm Sorry' Long Before 'See You in Court'", discusses the problems of medical errors, malpractice suits and explores how "a handful of prominent academic medical centers, like Johns Hopkins and Stanford, are trying a disarming approach."

The article by Kevin Sack is a good read, and should be of significant interest to hospital administrators, physicians and patients. The "disarming approach" being put forward is that, if and when a medical mistake occurs, the doctor and hospital should immediately apologize to the patient, explain what happened and be forthcoming with all information instead of adopting the "deny and defend" strategy advocated by malpractice lawyers and insurers.

To bolster the argument is the case study of the University of Michigan Health System which, according to Richard C. Boothman, the medical center’s chief risk officer, saw a very large drop in lawsuits, settlement amounts and time to settlement after instituting such a program. Boothman is quoted that "Improving patient safety and patient communication is more likely to cure the malpractice crisis than defensiveness and denial."

So what does this have to do with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Well, almost two years ago to the day, they co-authored an article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled, "Making Patient Safety the Centerpiece of Medical Liability Reform".

Yes, co-authored! They agreed on something.

And their 2006 article portrays precisely the program described in tomorrow's New York Times story. It even used the University of Michigan as the prime example where this has worked. In fact, the NEJM offers an audio interview with the same Richard Boothman as part of the article online.

Back in May 2006, we featured the Clinton-Obama article on our news page because we thought it very forward of two highly regarded political leaders to promote such a carefully thought-out program in a peer-reviewed scholarly medical journal. It's quite likely in fact that the "prominent medical centers" now experimenting with this strategy read the NEJM piece when it was published.

So how come the Times didn't acknowledge this forward-thinking journal article from two years ago? The Times piece does briefly mention that Clinton and Obama had sponsored some legislation in this area, but the Senators' NEJM article is not mentioned once in the NYT story, which seems a bit odd to me....

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