20 People Who Make Healthcare Better Health Leaders Media Magazine

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" 20 People Who Make Healthcare Better " - Health Leaders Media Magazine -

December 2008

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Gil Mileikowsky, whistleblower

Whistleblowers often pay a high price for exposing flaws in the healthcare

system. Like a lot of physicians who have been in his situation, Gil

Mileikowsky, MD, essentially lost his livelihood. It started in 2000 when he was

approached by a lawyer representing a patient whose Fallopian tubes were removed

without consent. He hadn't heard of the case, even though it happened in his

own department, and he began to suspect that other patient safety incidents

weren't being reviewed through the proper channels. He agreed to serve as an

expert witness against Tarzana Regional Medical Center, a joint venture of HCA

and Tenet HealthSystem, and four days later the hospital CEO informed him that

he would be escorted by security while on hospital grounds. A few months

later he was suspended.

That was just the beginning of a long legal battle that is still ongoing. The

American Medical Association, the California Medical Association, and other

physician and consumer organizations—including a partnership between doctors

and trial lawyers spearheaded by attorney Alan Dershowitz—filed amicus briefs

on Mileikowsky's behalf. For many of his supporters, the central issue is

peer review and whether hospitals should have authority to remove a physician

without due process. His case recently led to a new California law that

extends whistleblower protection to all physicians, and he has campaigned for

similar protections on the federal level.

But in Mileikowsky's eyes, he is locked in a much grander struggle to improve

the quality of the healthcare system. He founded the Alliance for Patient

Safety to document his case and push for safety reforms, and he has developed

what he believes is a solution to poor quality control—a " black box " for

physicians. Hospital errors should be reviewed in double-blind studies by

randomly

selected specialists to remove bias or potential conflict of interest, he

argues. Although he never intended to become a whistleblower, he says his goal

is now to expose flaws in the entire system, not just one hospital.

Whistleblowers like Mileikowsky play an important role in an industry that is

often unsuccessful at policing itself; they now initiate nine out of 10

fraud cases for the Department of Justice. Although in some situations they

stand

to receive up to 25% of any amount recovered, that wasn't the case for

Mileikowsky. " I didn't wake up one day and say, 'I want to become a

whistleblower,' " he says. " A whistleblower is just someone who tries to sound

the alarm

about a wrong situation. "

—Elyas Bakhtiari

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