Dr. Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined in Atul Gawande's bestselling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy surgeon who has worked in many of the best hospitals in the nation, he can testify to the amazing power of modern medicine to cure. But he's also been a witness to a medical culture that routinely leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limbs, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting. Over the last ten years, neither error rates nor costs have come down, despite scientific progress and efforts to curb expenses. Why? To patients, the healthcare system is a black box. Doctors and hospitals are unaccountable, and the lack of transparency leaves both bad doctors and systemic flaws unchecked. Patients need to know more of what healthcare workers know, so they can make informed choices. Accountability in healthcare would expose dangerous doctors, reward good performance, and force positive change nationally, using the power of the free market. Unaccountable is a powerful, no-nonsense, non-partisan diagnosis for healing our hospitals and reforming our broken healthcare system.
Marty Makary is the author of "Unaccountable," a story about modern medicine's dangerous practices and its nascent transparency revolution.
Dr. Makary is a practicing surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital and an associate professor of health policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. A medical commentator for a CNN and FOXNews, he speaks regularly on the sociology of medicine and the future of healthcare. Dr. Makary led the effort of the World Health Organization (WHO) to measure hospital complications and was the first to publish studies on the use of a checklist in surgery. He later worked closely with Dr. Atul Gawande to develop the official WHO checklist. Dr. Gawande credits the co-development of the surgical checklist to Dr. Makary in his best-selling book, "The Checklist Manifesto".
Dr. Makary's research has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine and numerous other medical journals. He is the recipient of research grants from the Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and has written extensively on the subject of patient empowerment in healthcare. He serves in leadership roles at the American College of Surgeons and is the author of "General Surgery Review," a standard textbook used in many medical schools. In 2007, Dr. Makary was named the Mark Ravitch Chair of Gastrointestinal Surgery at Johns Hopkins. His current role is Director of Surgery Quality and Safety at Johns Hopkins. He specializes in cancer surgery and is the Director of the Johns Hopkins Pancreas Islet Transplant Center.
Dr. Makary holds degrees from Bucknell University, Thomas Jefferson University, and Harvard University. He completed his surgical training at Georgetown University and subspecialty training at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in the Washington D.C. area.
