Running a hospital: Tipping point? (for trasparent health care orgs)

This is a thoughtful post from Paul Levy of the Running a Hospital Blog (and, of the Chief Executive’s office of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) about achieving transparency among major health care institutions:

Running a hospital: Tipping point?

The post came because I was ribbing him a bit because of his quick mastery of the Twitter learning curve, and it goes beyond that to provide a bit of reflection.

I think I now take for granted that the BIDMC organization (through its reporting as well as through Paul and John Halamka’s blogs) is more transparent to its community. For example, I assume that if I want to download a strategic plan for a large Information Technology operation in health care, it will be available on John’s blog. I don’t know of another I.T. organization that I can download strategic plans to learn from. That’s differentiating for me, and I’ll go so far as to say that it’s probably differentiating for patients, too. I still believe that patients don’t expect us to be perfect, but they do expect us to learn from our mistakes quickly.

Ted Eytan, MD