Putting Privacy Over Patient Safety

On the other hand, sometimes bureaucrats can be too literal in these matters. An important piece appears in today’s New York Times by surgeon Atul Gawande, exposing how government bureaucrats shut down a promising experimental system for preventing hospital acquired infections—a real and growing problem in America and elsewhere. He writes:

Such a success cannot be tolerated: The Feds shut the pilot program down because it allegedly violated the privacy rights of “human subjects:”

Yet this past month, the Office for Human Research Protections shut the program down. The agency issued notice to the researchers and the Michigan Health and Hospital Association that, by introducing a checklist and tracking the results without written, informed consent from each patient and health-care provider, they had violated scientific ethics regulations. Johns Hopkins had to halt not only the program in Michigan but also its plans to extend it to hospitals in New Jersey and Rhode Island. The government’s decision was bizarre and dangerous. But there was a certain blinkered logic to it, which went like this: A checklist is an alteration in medical care no less than an experimental drug is. Studying an experimental drug in people without federal
monitoring and explicit written permission from each patient is unethical and illegal. Therefore it is no less unethical and illegal to do the same with a checklist.

Only a bureaucrat could come to that conclusion.