Landmark Hospital heart program is ‘right on target’
To the Editor:
Landmark Medical Center’s open-heart surgery program is right on target. When the R.I. Department of Health approved Landmark’s certificate of need to implement a new open-heart surgery program, the department wisely noted that any new major initiative should begin slowly and build toward the goals that have been targeted for achievement.
Currently, that goal is set at the three-year point, and we are half-way to that point. Our progress so far is outstanding by any independent measure of quality, and we are vigilant about critical evaluation and benchmarking along the way.
Beyond Cash Donations: How New Forms of Giving Are Transforming Not-for-Profit Accounting
Evolving Funding Landscape for Not-for-Profits Not-for-profit organizations are being asked to do more with less,…
Learn More
Readers of Providence Business News will note the Dec. 11 article, which reported on our progress from a business perspective. The investment made by this hospital in our open-heart program is significant and strong and it is very much an investment.
While [PBN Managing Editor Marion Davis] was working on this story, the Department of Health issued a variance to its requirement that hospitals perform a specific minimum number of open-heart surgeries as a measure of quality and to maintain licensure. Wisely, the department’s Tertiary Care Committee has been assigned the task of reviewing how the state sets its benchmarks for quality, and we at Landmark commend them for this wise and academically sound step.
The public has several venues available to look at quality, morbidity and mortality for nearly every procedure performed at hospitals in this country. There are reporting groups who monitor new and existing programs – and today, the medical consumer is more savvy than ever before in seeking out this information.
We thank Providence Business News for keeping the progress of what we are doing at Landmark Medical Center before its readership. Landmark is committed to the success of its open-heart program – and we applaud the Department of Health for taking a step that will eventually determine more significant ways of measuring and benchmarking successful outcomes. Setting the highest standards of review is a process that all hospitals should embrace.
We are eager to share our experiences and our knowledge with the Tertiary Care Committee in an open dialogue that will attain, as an end result, the identification of meaningful and significant measures of quality outcomes. Doing so will raise the bar for us all, as well as provide the general public with information they require to make informed health care choices for themselves and their family.
Gary J. Gaube
President and CEO
Landmark Medical Center
Treating global warming is the lower-risk option
To the Editor:
There is so much being said on both sides of the global-warming issue, with each claiming that its view is the right one. Rather than trying to divine the right view, however, I think it is far more useful to consider the costs of being wrong.
If on the one hand, we believe that global warming is real, and that if we stay on the present course, the oceans will rise, wiping out coast lines and skin-cancer rates will increase because of the hole in the ozone layer, but we are actually wrong, then we will have spent a bunch of money to avoid disasters that never happened. But we will end up in a world with less air pollution, cleaner water, more efficient cars and, arguably, a better quality of life for everyone.
On the other hand, if we do little to halt the production of greenhouse gases, but rather continue our dependency on fossil fuels, believing that global warming is just a hoax, and this view turns out to be the wrong one, then we will have saved lots of money for the energy industries and automakers that contribute the most to global warming and pollution, and we will experience devastation of catastrophic proportions.
Seems like an easy choice to me.
Harvey Waxman
Wickford
