
Hospital Kept Vegetative Patient on Life Support to Boost Survival Rates - danso
https://www.propublica.org/article/audio-shows-hospital-kept-vegetative-patient-on-life-support-to-boost-survival-rates
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abdullahkhalids
This is classic Goodhart's law [1]. Humans or systems of humans will
automatically game any metric that is used to measure them. Whenever you start
using a number of measure performance, people start to forget about ethics.

This is also happening in university education these days where professor's
performance is being measured by metrics that only roughly correlate to
teaching ability. So, profs spend more time ensuring their metrics don't fall
below the acceptable value than they do trying to improve their teaching
performance. In other words, introducing these bad metrics to somehow measure
and improve teaching performance, actually results in worse teaching
performance.

[1] "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." or

"when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then
it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to
game it."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

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lathiat
I had previously heard about similar problems with surgeons not wanting to
dent their "mortality" rate by refusing to operate on cases that were in some
way likely to result in death.

Obviously this results in worse outcomes for those patients either by
requiring a less experienced surgeon or possibly not being operated on at all.

Can't immediately find a citation.

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alexfromapex
This is why healthcare is broken. I’ve also heard that hospitals can lose
accreditation for having bad outcomes and will turn away risky patients which
is just as horrible.

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noir_lord
Healthcare in the US certainly.

I mean other health care systems have various problems but when the profit-
motive (in the form of the hospital administration) clashes with the medical
side, we know which one usually wins.

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pvaldes
So, basically, everybody wins

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enjoyitasus
Isn't this the perfect case of having the wrong incentives?!

