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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:
    February 20th, 2011 at 9:30AM

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

    Literally, maybe.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:
    February 20th, 2011 at 9:40AM

    Yeah. Yikes.

  3. MattF Says:
    February 20th, 2011 at 10:03AM

    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:
    February 21st, 2011 at 8:45AM

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

  5. Margaret Soltan Says:
    February 21st, 2011 at 10:13AM

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

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