Paul O'Neill ... chides UPMC for not joining plan to eliminate medication errors.
Posted on 12/08/2004 9:32:30 PM PST by pittsburgh gop guy
Thursday, December 09, 2004 By Pamela Gaynor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has quit the board of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, saying he did so because he was frustrated that the region's largest health care provider would not embrace a regional plan for eliminating medication errors.
Paul O'Neill ... chides UPMC for not joining plan to eliminate medication errors. |
O'Neill helped launch the regional initiative, one of the first of its kind in the country,shortly before the federal Institute of Medicine, in a landmark study five years ago, estimated medical errors kill 98,000 people annually. He remains on its board.
"The fact that the leading academic medical center in this part of the world wouldn't make a public declaration that it was going to identify medication errors ... makes it difficult to say that the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative is really regional," said O'Neill, who began the initiative while he was chairman of Alcoa and rejoined it after leaving his job as President Bush's Treasury secretary at the end of 2002.
O'Neill, who was appointed as a UPMC trustee and member of the board's executive committee in 2003, resigned from the board in mid-September.
UPMC, as a matter of policy, does not disclose who serves on its board, though the health system's president, Jeffrey Romoff, said at the time of O'Neill's appointment that he welcomed O'Neill because of his widely recognized knowledge about health care.
O'Neill and Romoff, however, are said to have clashed on numerous matters, including the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System's liver transplant program, which last year broke away from UPMC.
One board member, who asked not to be identified, said that while UPMC's refusal to embrace the medication-error reporting project might have been a tipping point, O'Neill was also dissatisfied with the amount of information executive committee members received before voting on important decisions.
"If it wasn't this [stance on the medication error project] it would have been something else," the board member said.
UPMC Board Chairman G. Nicholas Beckwith III dismissed speculation that O'Neill had resigned over any quarrel about how much information the health system's leadership shared with its executive committee.
He also said that "UPMC has been an active participant" in numerous quality improvement projects sponsored by the regional health care initiative, but "because of the press of business and the press of time, we haven't been able to participate in all of the projects."
"As far as why Mr. O'Neill chose to resign, I think only he can respond," Beckwith said.
O'Neill would not comment on any dispute he might have had with Romoff concerning the VA Pittsburgh Health System's organ transplantation program, but he did not disagree that he "had a few set-tos" with top UPMC management over what he saw as the insufficiency of information shared on some important decisions. O'Neill said that in instances where he challenged the adequacy of information, he had been given what he wanted.
O'Neill maintained that his main reason for leaving UPMC's board was the health system's refusal earlier this year to participate in a proposed PRHI undertaking in which participating hospitals would have committed to eliminating all medication errors.
The campaign, which was never launched, would have begun with identifying errors that occurred because of the illegibility of handwriting on prescriptions.
"The reason to start there is it engages the first people in the process ... namely the doctors," he said.
O'Neill said UPMC's unwillingness to participate in the project made him question the system's desire to be held to measurable standards of quality.
"I don't understand the leadership there," he said.
O'Neill said he "found that being an insider at UPMC didn't make any difference" in his ability to push the health system to fully embrace the kinds of quality projects the regional health initiative was spearheading.
The projects were modeled after practices borrowed from industrial titans such as Alcoa and Toyota. Those companies improved performance on an array of issues, ranging from production to safety by examining each step in a process to determine where things go wrong.
O'Neill's use of such practices in overhauling Alcoa -- including ones that dramatically reduced occupational injuries -- has become the stuff of legend in major academic business reviews as well as in the news media.
O'Neill has said he is convinced that eliminating medical errors is the key not just to improving quality but to lowering runaway health care costs, possibly by as much as half.
Others said UPMC wasn't the only player in the region's health-care landscape to refuse participation in the medication error project or to be reluctant to pursue some other quality improvement initiatives.
"I wouldn't say it was just UPMC," said Karen Feinstein, who chairs the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative. "We have varying degrees [of acceptance] from a number of systems."
She and O'Neill both said the organization is rethinking its mission and structure.
O'Neill's outspokenness about his quarrels with UPMC is not unusual for him. He also bared his quarrels with the Bush administration in former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind's book, "The Price of Loyalty."
O'Neill is obviously the smartest person in the world.
How dumb of us not to embrace his superiority over all things, big and small.
Does not play well with others.
"Yeah right. NOT! Pointing out medical errors is the same as dialing direct to John Edwards and saying his ship is in again and again and again....You get the picture"
So in your world it should stay:
Just kill them and shut up!
The latter. Bearing in mind Alcoholism has a diagnosis -- and symptoms, including grandiosity.
And doesn't give a damn who you are and/or what you do for a living -- and afflicts equal percentages of kings, queens, princes, princeses presidents, corporate heads, judges, accountants, wharf laborers janitors, laborers, bums, layabouts, lawyers and actors.
Also, if you sniff him out on Lexis Nexis you'll find a lot of references to his "ecentricity" and the like.
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