A major aspect is miscommunication. According to the Joint Commission: "Ineffective hand-off communication is recognized as a critical patient safety problem in health care; in fact, an estimated 80% of serious medical errors involve miscommunication between caregivers during the transfer of patients." [1]

I co-founded Care Thread [2] to help address the communication problems I saw working in hospitals. Electronic medical records systems weren't designed around real-time communication, and mobile secure messaging systems tend to replicate the original alpha pager workflow, without directing the improved technology at improving collaboration.

The project involves removing points of communication friction, keeping track of the patient's care team, injecting relevant EMR data into the communications stream and pushing it to the right care team members as soon as it's available, and keeping everything visible to the interested parties.

If you're interested in something like this, I'd love to talk. Please contact me through my profile or on our web site.

[1] http://www.jointcommission.org/assets/1/6/tst_hoc_persp_08_1... [2] http://www.carethread.com

If we couldn't get surgeons to use a simple checklist procedure which was shown to reduce the number of errors, I don't know what will.

Enabling free(er) competition into the medical marketplace for doctors would probably be the single most effective maneuver.

That and letting machines begin replacing human doctors...