by Richard G. Lanzara

Created on: August 17, 2008

All of us are potential patients requiring "healthcare", but labeling this care as health care is in fact a misnomer as it is really medical care that concerns most people. There are significant differences between the two. Medical care is very expensive and it doesn't work perfectly. It treats everyone with every conceivable illness, which is often too much for most "health care" systems to handle competently. We'd all like the medical care system to work better and be more effective and safe in treating all of our ills, but this may be an illusive and too simplistic goal for any system of organized care with finite resources.

Reporting and tracking medical care errors should have been done for decades by now and in many areas they have been continously collected and analyzed. Many states such as Illinois and Minnesota collect information about serious medical errors. These include mistakes or lapses in treatment that everybody agrees should never happen. Finding and fixing these serious problems are essential components to any competent and accredited health care system today. Yet there are often significant problems in the way that these statistics are gathered and reported. One problem is that some of the busiest and best health care providers handle the most difficult patients. These patients are often poorer, inner city residents or homeless. Some are illegal immigrants who don't speak any English. Often they have their own alternative treatments that may be dangerous to their health. Many patients can not communicate effectively to the medical personnel to tell them what medicines they've taken or what their allergies are to foods and drugs. These are obviously significant problems that can significantly increase the overall risks for these patients and thereby increase the medical errors in the institutions that care for such patients. It is the gray areas between the serious medical mistakes that we can all agree shouldn't happen and the areas where the medical care system is over extended and taxed by caring for difficult patient populations that disagreements and discussions arise concerning the meaning of these statistics.

The U.S. health care industry already has several internal review and health care monitoring systems such as "IPRO" (http://www.ipro.org/), the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA at http://www.ncqa.org/), the National Center for Health Statistics from the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/ ) and state health departments

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