Overlapping surgeries to face US Senate inquiry

[unhappycamper]

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/12/senator-launches-inquiry-into-simultaneous-surgeries-hospitals-including-mass-general/wxEsbg5r2poqtk88LkcHQI/story.html



Tony Meng, a Westwood father of two, did not learn his physician also was operating on another patient during his 11-hour spine surgery until after he emerged paralyzed.

Overlapping surgeries to face US Senate inquiry
By Jonathan Saltzman and Jenn Abelson Globe Staff
March 13, 2016

The chairman of a powerful US Senate committee has asked 20 hospital systems, including the parent company of Massachusetts General Hospital, to provide detailed records about the controversial practice of allowing surgeons to operate on more than one patient at a time.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican who heads the Finance Committee, has requested the information, including the total number of “concurrent surgeries,’’ broken down by specialty, at each hospital from 2011 to 2015, and policies about whether patients are informed beforehand.

Committee staffers have already met with representatives of the American College of Surgeons, the world’s largest surgeons’ organization, which is drafting new guidelines to regulate double-booking of surgeries in the wake of a recent Globe Spotlight Team report on the practice.

“We are concerned about reports of patients not being informed that they may be sharing their surgeon with another patient, and we are especially concerned by reports that, in some cases, steps have been taken to actively conceal this practice from patients,’’ Hatch wrote in a copy of the Feb. 16 letter to hospitals obtained by the Globe.