Turning Errors into Gold: part 2
David’s idea, in a nutshell, is as follows: “Any new prescription drug program should incorporate mechanisms to inform Congress and the public about the benefits or harms associated with the program and create incentives to prescription drug plans, providers, and consumers to make effective use of the new benefit.”2 Under this new Medicare drug benefit that he envisions, public disclosure of information about the performance of prescription drug plans would serve multiple objectives:
Performance data could assist Medicare beneficiaries in selecting the plan most likely to meet their needs; help the government determine which plans should be made available to the public; permit Congress to determine if beneficiaries are receiving health benefits that justify the new federal expenditures; and create incentives for drug benefit plans to invest in and focus management effort on delivering safe, effective, and high quality service. canadian cialis
When you reflect on this, it is a fantastic idea! Public disclosure of plan performance, coupled with public disclosure of health outcomes and disclosure of dispensing accuracy, would give society a way to understand more fully what it is paying for and a way to improve the process of drug dispensing and follow-up simultaneously. In effect, this proposed statutory responsibility—to report on the effectiveness of a new federally funded benefit—might have wide-ranging implications for other major public insurance programs.
There might be additional positive effects from such a refreshingly straightforward idea. For example, people might recognize that they are not always getting the quality of care that they have paid for and that they had assumed to be good care. Here is where David’s work over the last seven years comes to the fore. FACCT’s mission, in part, is to help the public recognize that it may not be getting the value for its health care dollar. In addition, such a statutory support for error reporting would help us turn those errors into gold, literally, by improving the process, by weeding out poor performers, and by ensuring that Medicare beneficiaries get the right drug at the right dose, at the right time, by the right route, and for the right patient—the “five rights” that were discussed in the October 2002 issue of P&T.
Sometimes great ideas appear deceptively simple-minded. Of course, there are organizational and political barriers that we have not considered, such as requiring the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish reporting specifications within 12 months of enactment, based on consultation with appropriate private and public sector experts and organizations. This is surely a tall order for our regulatory bodies, but it is doable, in my view. online pharmacy no prescription
Instead of continuing the debate about medical errors and the public hand-wringing and brow-furrowing that they entail, let us work together to implement effective legislation to turn errors into gold and to redistribute that “gold” in the form of a Medicare drug benefit for millions of deserving Americans.
