Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The checklist and future culture of medicine
Like many New Yorkers, I learned about the checklist in a magazine. I remember thinking, in late 2007, that maybe I'd seen something on the subject in The New England Journal. Indeed, a year earlier Dr. Peter Pronovost and colleagues reported on a simple, inexpensive strategy to save lives in a now-landmark article, "An Intervention to Decrease Catheter-Related Bloodstream Infections in the ICU." Still, I'd missed the paper. Or at least I'd overlooked the significance.
Fortunately I had the opportunity to hear Pronovost, a still-youngish professor at Johns Hopkins and recent MacArthur award recipient, speak at last spring's annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists in Chicago. After hearing his talk, I couldn't wait to read more.
The checklist refers to five steps doctors can take to reduce the likelihood of patients getting serious infections from catheters placed in the ICU. One problem with Pronovost's quintet is that it's, well, unexciting. In his book Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals he reveals what a person shouldn't forget before inserting an intravenous (IV) tube through a vein to the heart's entryway:
1. Wash hands with something like soap before the procedure;
2. Set up a clean work area by covering the patient with a sterile drape and donning a gown, cap, mask and sterile gloves;
3. Insert the catheter in a place other than the patient's groin, if possible;
4. Wipe down the patient's skin with antiseptic fluid, chlorhexidine;
5. Remove catheters that are no longer needed.
Pronovost, an intensive care specialist who holds an MD and a PhD in Public Health, first tested the checklist on his home turf, the surgical ICU at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., in 2001. At the start, he distributed the list and asked ICU staff nurses to mark physicians' compliance. It turned out the doctors skipped at least one step in over a third of central catheter placements. Next, he upped the list's power by talking to Hopkins administrators. Nurses, they said, could call out a physician if they didn't stick to the rules.
"This was revolutionary," said Atul Gawande in the New Yorker.
What's the big deal, you may wonder. It's this: First, in the usual culture of medical practice, doctors don't follow orders but give orders. And second, what's implicit in the checklist is that physicians--even at one of the world's most renowned medical facilities--are fallible to such a degree that their work can improve, and measurably so, by using something as ordinary as a checklist. It's humbling.
"We don't use checklists in health care because we still have this myth of perfection," Pronovost said at the journalism conference.
In the year after Pronovost's team implemented the checklist at Johns Hopkins, the rate of central catheter infections there dropped from 11% to zero. As for how much good this did, the estimate runs at 43 infections spared, eight deaths avoided and $2 million saved in one year at that hospital alone. The work expanded, soon to cover ICUs in most hospitals in the state of Michigan. There, after a lot of fuss, administrative hurdles and number crunching of results for some 375,757 catheter-days worth of infection data, the incidence of central line-associated bacterial infections snapped from 2.7, on average, for every 1,000 days a patient was in a Michigan ICU with at least one central line, down to 0 (zero!).
These numbers are supported by impressive stats, with P values falling below 0.002 in the original study. Estimates for the Keystone Initiative render some 1,000 lives saved and $175 million in hospital costs reduced in a single year in Michigan. What's more, all of this was accomplished without the use of expensive technology or additional ICU staffing.
This is a win/win intervention with huge implications. Every day some 90,000 people receive care in ICUs in North America. The annual incidence of catheter-related blood infections is 80,000 per year in the U.S.; the cost of treating each line infection runs around $45,000. In the U.S., we might save over $3 billion in expenses per year.
So why aren't more hospitals and states adopting these and other, similar measures? Gawande addresses this, to some extent, in the New Yorker piece and in his book, The Checklist Manifesto. "There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of things doctors do that are at least as dangerous and prone to human failure as putting central lines into ICU patients," he writes. "All have steps that are worth putting on a checklist and testing in routine care. The question still unanswered is whether medical culture will embrace the opportunity."
Poka-yoke, a Japanese term for rendering a repetitive process mistake-proof, may be familiar to business students and corporate executives. This concept, that simple strategies can reduce errors in highly complex works, is not the kind of thing most doctors pick up in med school. Rather, it remains foreign.
Pronovost is unusual because he examines health care delivery, in itself, rather than attempting an innovative cure for cancer or surgical method. His work just isn't sexy enough to sell. I suspect that's the reason he came to the health care journalism conference in Chicago and gave such an impassioned talk about the checklist, so that a few of us might help get the word out.
Things change, after all, and sometimes they do get better.
This post originally appeared at Medical Lessons, written by Elaine Schattner, ACP Member, a non-practicing hematologist and oncologist who teaches at Weill Cornell Medical College, where she is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine. She shares her ideas on education, ethics in medicine, health care news and culture. Her views on medicine are informed by her past experiences in caring for patients, as a researcher in cancer immunology and as a patient who's had breast cancer.
Labels: culture of medicine, hospital medicine, ICU care, medical checklist, patient safety, Poka-yoke, quality of care
posted by Elaine Schattner, M.D. at
12:04 PM
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2 Comments:
Hi Elaine!
It's nice of you to share and elaborate Mr. Pronovost's ICU checklist.
You may want to share them too with other medicine professionals over at Expert Checklist http://expertchecklists.com/. It's a new web app for professionals working in difficult and complex environments where users can work together to create and discuss very effective checklists for their fields.
The cool thing is that you can modify the list for yourself and print it as pdf. On the web site, you can also work together with other pros to improve the list or discuss changes.
Thanks for your comment, Jovy. I think there's a huge potential for checklists to be used in more kinds of medical procedures. But doctors aren't robots, nor should they be. It will be interesting to see how and under what circumstances these sorts of safety checks are adapted, or not, in the future.
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