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Their big mistake was hiring a quality improvement officer.

I’ve said there will be more and more of these university hospital Medicare stories, until they become A Story.

Indeed I foresee (Les UD’s finally got around, last night, to watching Ed Wood — which UD laughed through and Mr UD found “depressing” — and I’m thinking here of The Amazing Criswell’s predictions.) the larger story featured in a long Page One piece in the New York Times.

This particular story, out of the SUNY system, features spine-tingling allegations from a staff doctor who also served as “quality improvement officer” for the neurosurgery department. (He works now at Boston University.)

The chair of the hospital’s neurosurgery department – who fired the whistleblower shortly after he started blowing the whistle – was himself eventually brought down by his Nazi fetish.

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Update: Note that I’ve changed Syracuse to SUNY. Syracuse sold the hospital to the SUNY system. UD thanks Mr Punch for the correction.

Margaret Soltan, February 20, 2011 8:48AM
Posted in: the university, trust me - i'm a doctor

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5 Responses to “Their big mistake was hiring a quality improvement officer.”

  1. francofou Says:

    “I am very much interested in having what they’ve done unearthed.”

    Literally, maybe.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Yeah. Yikes.

  3. MattF Says:

    Neurosurgeons, of course, are famously arrogant and indifferent to other people’s opinions– so it’s quite possible that no one in this particular tale is entirely innocent.

    My own little neurosurgeon story: Many years ago, I was asked for an opinion on an instrument that was being designed to measure fluid pressure in the cranium– I made some comment on how pressure would be transmitted through the various elements in the system, and the surgeons were impressed enough to comment that I’d make a good first year medical student. The fact that I have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics was not, apparently, considered to be relevant.

  4. Mr Punch Says:

    NOT Syracuse University, I believe – Upstate Medical is part of the SUNY system, taken over from SU about 1950.

  5. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Thanks for the correction, Mr Punch. I’ll note that in the post.

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