Blogs

Surgeon Athletes–Lessons from Cycling -Michael G. Vitale, MD, MPH

How Lessons from Cycling Can Inform Efforts at Continuous Improvement: A recent conversation with an avid cycler helped me draw interesting parallels between how sport and the pursuit of skill so often intersects with our mission to make care better in Read More...

One of the questions I often received prior to the first annual spine safety summit in 2016 is “why organize another Spine Surgery conference?” My answer is inevitably, “how could we not?” The time could not be more urgent. At every talk I give, I always like to put the audience in the right mindset, which is “how will the next patient be harmed?” Somewhere out there, there’s a patient coming to your waiting room or in a cab or Read More...

Developing the Wrong Site Surgery Checklist: Far too often, healthcare fails to provide the level of reliability that is expected around a patient’s sense of quality. Even meeting quality and safe patient care 99.9% of the time may not be enough. For reference, if 99.9% was an appropriate threshold, Amazon would still be failing to deliver 1,600 packages per day and the US Postal Service would be losing 506,000 parcels per Read More...

Best Practice Guidelines & Videos
Introduction to Safety in Spine Surgery Month
Safety in Spine Surgery Month—Welcome and Introduction by Michael Vitale, MD NewYork-Presbyterian