To Forgive Is Divine

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine released a report on hospital errors titled "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System." In this report, IOM discovered that as many as 98,000 people die every year in U.S. hospitals due to medical errors (i.e., Human mistakes).

Since the release of this report, the medical industry has instituted many changes to combat human error. Despite these measures, mistakes still happen. How we handle those mistakes is what makes the difference.

Paul Levy highlights a story on MSNBC about a doctor who recently published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine about a surgical error at Mass General Hospital--an error he made.

It is an interesting concept to publicize your own mistake. It is also a positive way to deal with errors--even ones as embarrassing as performing the wrong surgery. As Levy points out, if we aren't open about our mistakes, we can't prevent them from happening in the future. Levy would know, his hospital had a similar situation a couple of years ago.

On the lighter side, Levy found time to discuss the merits of water in hotel conference rooms. He is the hotel water equivalent to Peter King's coffee nerdness, I suppose. A year ago, he did his best Freakonomics impression on a Boston hotel's choice of water. In this case, it was $2 bottle of water from Norway. Then there is the blueberry water, seen on the left, which created this off-topic line of inquiry:

In our group, the first question was, "Do you think they washed them?" The second question was, "Do you think they are real?" Then, "Can you taste them at all?" Answer: No.

He later asks: "Is there something they teach in hotel school that suggests that having unusual water in conference rooms is good for business?"

It is an interesting economics discussion, well-suited for a CEO. It is also a refreshing break from some of the more serious topics on the blog. In case you are wondering, BIDMC has ditched the bottles in favor of tap water. They discovered what most people know, even if they still pay for it, once out of the bottle, water tastes, well, like water.

And now for the weekend...