Lax oversight favors doctors over patients

PART 1: [Wisconsin's] lax system of oversight favors doctors over patients. A Journal Sentinel review of five years' worth of disciplinary action found that the board is slow to look into complaints, keeps many of its investigations secret and rarely imposes serious discipline, even when patients die.

PART 2: The patient, a man who had been injured on the job, was feeling out of it and dizzy and his vision was blurred. Huffman checked the patient's IV, according to court records. The next thing the man knew, he said, he felt Huffman performing oral sex on him. Three months after the February 1991 incident, a second patient at St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee said he awoke to Huffman indecently touching him. In June 1991 Huffman was charged with two felonies. He pleaded guilty to reduced charges of misdemeanor sexual assault in January 1992. The doctor went to jail. But he didn't lose his medical license. State officials say they took progressively harsher action against Huffman over the next decade - action they thought would protect patients. They were wrong.
Despite his record, Huffman managed to get hired at three other facilities. Patients at two of them accused him of sexual misconduct. His license was revoked effective Feb. 28, 2002 - 11 years after his first documented sexual assault of a patient.

Doctors don't report colleagues, errors

Nearly half of doctors surveyed say they have failed to report an impaired or incompetent colleague or a serious medical error, and more than one-third say they would order an unneeded MRI scan for an insistent patient - though these actions conflict with what the physicians consider the heart of their professional obligations.

The survey is the first broad attempt to measure the success of a new movement called "medical professionalism." Arguing that government regulation, financial incentives, and public reporting alone will not improve the quality and efficiency of medical care, physicians groups in the past several years have been promoting a new code of professional values, meant to modernize the ancient Hippocratic Oath.

Many Massachusetts hospitals will pay for errors

About half of Massachusetts hospitals say they have adopted policies to waive charges for serious medical errors such as wrong-site surgery and harmful medication mistakes, and others say they plan to, amid growing resistance from government and health insurers to paying for poor outcomes.