Dr. Pronovost is a leading figure in the patient safety movement, and is someone I greatly admire. His work with surgical checklists is touted by Dr. Atul Gawande as having saved more lives than any researcher in the past decade. However, I disagree with his latest initiative- to get hospitals who perform certain procedures at very low rates to stop performing them altogether.
On the surface, it seems like a perfect idea- hospitals that perform few surgeries of a certain type usually have worse outcomes and higher patient mortality than hospitals that perform many of them, a fact that has been known for decades. However, the issue is more complex than it first appears.
