By Roni Caryn Rabin, Kaiser Health News
Betsy Gabay saw a rotating cast of at least 14 doctors when she was hospitalized at New York Hospital Queens for almost four weeks last year for a flare-up of ulcerative colitis. But the person she credits with saving her life is a spry, persistent 75-year-old with a vested interest – her mother.
Alarmed by her daughter’s rapid deterioration and then by her abrupt discharge from the hospital, Gabay’s mother contacted a physician friend who got her daughter admitted to Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan.
By then, Gabay, 50, had a blood clot in her lung and a serious bacterial infection, C. difficile. She also needed to have her diseased colon removed, according to the doctors at Mount Sinai. Had the problems been left unaddressed, any one of them might have killed her.
Coordinated care is touted as the key to better and more cost-effective care, and is being encouraged with financial rewards and penalties under the 2010 federal health care overhaul, as well as by private insurers. But experts say the communication failures that landed Gabay in a rehab center, rather than in surgery, remain disturbingly common.
“Nobody is responsible for coordinating care,” said Dr. Lucian Leape, a Harvard health policy analyst and a nationally recognized patient safety leader. “That’s the dirty little secret about health care.” (more…)
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