Case study of medical error in one of the best pediatric hospitals in the US.

This Boston Globe article should be required reading for anyone who is serious about addressing medical error in complex, high-quality, tertiary-care academic medical centers. "Communication and accountability problems" is the generic term for what went wrong at Children's Hospital in Boston, but the devil's in the details. For even more detail, the Massachusetts Department of Health has published a 24-page report on this and three other deaths at the hospital from August 2002 to July 2003. I haven;t found the report on the MDPH web site but I've e-mailed them about any plans they might have to post it and will provide the link as soon as I have one.