An innovation in medical treatment — which was supposed to offer more affordable, accessible, and even convenient care — instead may be getting swamped with safety problems that long have plagued hospitals and academic medical centers.
USA Today and Kaiser Health News Service deserve credit for digging into patients’ nightmares with specialized surgical centers, not only those performing “routine” procedures but also those handling increasingly longer, more complex, and difficult operations. The many surgeries, once the province only of big and well-staffed hospitals, put patients at risk, the newspaper reported, saying:
[Our] investigation found that surgery centers operate under such an uneven mix of rules across U.S. states that fatalities or serious injuries can result in no warning to government officials, much less to potential patients. The gaps in oversight enable centers hit with federal regulators’ toughest sanctions to keep operating, according to interviews, a review of hundreds of pages of court filings and government records obtained under open records laws. No rule stops a doctor exiled by a hospital for misconduct from opening a surgery center down the street.