Sometimes, not even money and connections are good enough.
The “favorite cousin” of former President Bill Clinton died as the result of a misdiagnosis. A wealthy close friend of his never got a definitive diagnosis for a fatal infection, Clinton said over the weekend.
Keynoting the fourth annual World Patient Safety, Science and Technology Summit in Dana Point, California, the former president explained how patient safety has become “deeply personal” for him.
Clinton told the story of a cousin who was misdiagnosed at a “perfectly adequate” clinic in Arkansas. “She was diagnosed as having the flu and told to take Theraflu. Forty-eight hours later, she was markedly worse. They rushed her to the hospital. They found out she had sepsis. She was dead in 36 hours.”
That was a wake-up call for Clinton, who is active with the summit’s organizer, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation, a not-for-profit that has set a goal of reaching zero preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals by 2020. Clinton has taken part in this annual event each year since its founding.
“One day, she was just gone from a perfectly preventable death,” Clinton said of his cousin, who was two years older than he.
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“I just started thinking about all the people who were going into these big, urban hospitals with plenty of capacity, but massive problems, and how easy it is when you’re trying to run a big operation to let the little details fall through the cracks,” Clinton said.
Clinton told another story about a friend, highly successful TV producer Michael King, who died last year of an infection that doctors were unable to identify.
“Genomics and nanotechnology, I hope, will allow dramatic increases in diagnostic capabilities.” Clinton said. That will expand the definition of preventable death, he explained, but also require that research facilities are interfaced to bring such capabilities to rural healthcare sites.
Sometimes, though not enough attention gets placed on patient safety, perhaps because the issue does not draw headlines the way news about terrorism does. the former president suggested. It helps to put things in a different perspective and look at trends rather than individual incidents.
While the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California, and in Paris dominated the news, the number of deaths was relatively small.
“Since 9/11, 45 Americans have been killed by terrorist incidents by people who were acting to advance a form of radical Islamic terror,” Clinton said. Citing National Institutes of Health data, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation said that 200,000 people died annually in U.S. hospitals — and 3 million globally — in ways that could have been prevented.
Here’s a video of Clinton’s remarks, as captured by a Periscope user.
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
