Medical mistakes are the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S., with one in four patients harmed by medical errors. But hospitals don't measure this stuff... and when they do, they rarely tell you about it.
Dr. Marty Makary, surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has written a provocative book, Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care, proposing new tools for transparency that could revolutionize health care. Dr. Makary joined me in the HuffPost Live studio Tuesday for a fascinating discussion on transparency and accountability in our hospitals with a medical student, a retired nurse, and a pharmacologist whose mother died from a simple medical mistake.
"We've got good people working in a bad system, and we haven't been able to talk openly and honestly about this problem for a long time," Dr. Makary said, adding that politicians discuss how to fund healthcare, but not how to fix the broken system.
Dr. Makary said he is looking to the current crop of medical students to demand transparency and honesty across the system.
"There's very little tolerance in [their] generation for not telling the truth," he said. "Essentially, they're sort of watchdogs of healthcare, and they're saying we need to be more honest with patients about their options, we need to be more honest with patients outcomes at a hospital level, and I think it's [their] generation that's changing health care right now."
Watch the full segment below: