Fixing America's Hospitals
Every day, hospitals across the country care for Americans in need. Babies are born, heart-attack victims are saved, broken bones are healed. But today, as the population ages, medical demands surge and costs rise, America's hospitals are being tested like never before. Solving the crisis is a formidable task, but innovative hospitals are rising to the challenge--they're reforming nursing practices, digitizing medical records, transforming end-of-life care.
The most urgent hurdle of all: improving patient safety. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine declared that close to 100,000 Americans die annually from medical errors. This year, more dire news: medication errors harm at least 1.5 million people and cost some $3.5 billion per year. What goes wrong? Missed diagnoses, incorrect drug dosing, failure to treat promptly. Experts agree that doctors, nurses, pharmacists and technicians will always make mistakes--it's the safety net around them that needs to be fixed. "No matter how good people are, they suffer from being human and they're going to screw up," says Jim Conway, senior vice president at Boston's Institute for Healthcare Improvement. "We have to put systems in place that stop that error from causing harm."
Those systems may be simple or high tech. In 2005, Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern, N.Y., launched Rapid Response Teams--on-call experts to tend to patients in distress. Since then, "codes" for cardiac and respiratory arrests have dropped 22 percent. "This is one of the best interventions I've seen in my entire career," says Kathleen Lynam, chief nurse officer. At Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, which owns or operates 22 hospitals, the timely use of antibiotics has slashed postoperative infections. And controlling blood-sugar levels during open-heart surgery has reduced the death rate from 2.49 percent to 0.18 percent.
Patient tragedies often trigger change. When Southwestern Vermont Medical Center execs heard Dale Micalizzi talk about the death of her 11-year-old son, Justin, after surgery for a swollen ankle at another hospital--and that hospital's lack of response--they reached out to her. Now, with Micalizzi's help, Southwestern is adopting a culture of openness after mistakes. "This is an injustice I experienced," she says, "and I can't let another mother go through it." A worthy goal for all.
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Claudia Kalb, who writes health and medical stories for the magazine, was named senior writer in December 2004. Kalb has reported on a wide range of medical and scientific issues, including stem cells, autism, reproductive medicine, HIV/AIDS and childhood obesity. Her cover stories for the magazine include “Kids and the Growing Food Allergy Threat” (October 2007); “Girl or Boy? Now You can Choose. But Should You?” (January 2004), which won a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York; and “SARS: What You Need to Know, The New Age of Epidemics” (May 2003). Kalb’s story “Battling a Black Epidemic” was featured in Newsweek’s special report, “AIDS at 25” (May 2006), which was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2007.
Kalb had been a general editor in New York since 1999 and a correspondent in the Boston bureau since 1996, where she covered medicine, politics, education, and family and social issues.
Prior to joining Newsweek in 1994, Kalb worked as a researcher and reporter at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center in New York, where she researched books, including Dictatorship of Virtue by then New York Times writer Richard Bernstein and Den of Lions by former Lebanon hostage Terry Anderson.
Kalb was awarded a Casey fellowship at the Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families (June 1998), a Knight mini-fellowship at the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT (December 1999) and a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University for the academic year 2001-2002.
Kalb received her B.A. and graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College before earning her Master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University. She works in Newsweek’s Washington bureau.
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