Medical errors causing harm to patients in many acute care situations have been saturating the media a lot recently.  The result is greater emphasis by hospitals in reducing the incidence of those preventable errors. Even Medicare has gotten into the act, developing compliance programs which utilize indirect methods of negative reinforcement to correct those preventable errors.  Vigilant hospitals can take pride in their efforts to reduce and eliminate those errors by way of their internal quality control mchanisms, but what happens when consistently underperforming institutions do next to nothing to correct preventable deficiencies?  Who polices them?  The government?  Private third parties whose involvent with clients is purely voluntary?  Some food for thought from the NYT.

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