 Shortly after being released, I watched the HBO award-winning documentary film, Bleed Out. By the end of the film, I was so angry. The devastating, life-changing, permanent, but very preventable harm inflicted on Judy Burroughs, followed by the lying, deceit, and cover-up after the event, made me embarrassed to be in health care. Bleed Out is a must-see movie that shares the many things that are wrong in health care today. I reached out to Steve and Margot Burroughs shortly after watching the movie, and apologized for the toxic, deny-and-defend culture inherent in many health systems, as well as medical malpractice today. The Burroughs family knows all too well how badly the system is broken, and now are working with us to make care safer and more transparent for all. Here to share his story is my very good friend, Steve Burroughs. I'm Steve Burroughs, writer-director of the HBO documentary film Bleed Out. Bleed Out is about my mom, Judy Burroughs, a vivacious, world-traveling, retired school teacher who, eleven years ago, went in for a routine partial hip replacement and came out in a coma with permanent brain damage. That horrific event began a decades-long battle of my mom fighting for her life and our family fighting for accountability, transparency, and justice in what happened to her. The preventable medical errors in my mom's case were not only individual, but systemic and pervasive. The pain and suffering my mom endured was devastating, the collateral damage to our family, and calculable. I became obsessed with getting my mother the best medical care possible, as well as trying to find out what happened to her so that it would never happen to anyone else on earth again. I became obsessed with accountability. Now I can tell you that for almost ten years, my family and I felt we were all alone. We thought this was just one long nightmare of a horrible cascade of medical mistakes that unfortunately happened to just my mom. But then I found out, almost by accident, that medical error is the third leading cause of death in America. I was floored. You mean we're not alone? That there are other patients and families out there just like us? Now this was a profoundly humbling discovery for me. Bittersweet in the extreme is I was terrified to learn that this happens a thousand times a day in America, while simultaneously comforted by the fact that our family was indeed not alone, now part of this huge club that none of us wanted to belong to. And once I found out that our story, our personal story, was a universal story, I knew that I had to tell that story. Medical harm does not discriminate. It can happen to anyone, at any time, all over the world, and it does. Complicating matters even more. These aren't criminals or Wall Street robber baron types or any of the usual suspect bad guys. These were the good guys, doctors and hospitals and nurses, heroes, the folks we blindly trust with our lives. How could this possibly be? Now like so many others before me, advocating for patient safety became not a job or a career, but now a calling. I didn't want to just tell my mom's story. I needed to tell my mom's story. And now through our film, I've had the very fortuitous gift of meeting thousands of other patients and their families who have either been injured or have lost loved ones due to preventable medical errors. Because of these beautiful human beings, each in their own way giving voice to the voiceless, the helplessness that I carried for years was replaced by hope, not fake hope or movie hope or I'm just saying it because I have to hope, but real, deep down in your blood, bone and guts hope. And for that, I thank those folks sincerely. After a ferocious battle for the life she once had, my mom passed away earlier this year, finally succumbing to the injuries inflicted upon her all those years before. Even through all our family's troubles, I could never fully understand what it was like to lose a loved one this way. Now I know. It is my absolute honor and privilege to introduce this memorial and tribute section of our program to these victims of medical error. I am in awe of them and what they stand for. Here's a photo gallery now to remind us of those who we lost, accompanied by the poignant music and lyrics of Michael Stillwater's Healing Light. God bless these souls and their families. Not only will you never be forgotten, but your stories, the legacy of your lives, are saving lives. Fly on into the sky, the stone. I don't wonder why I'm trusting life knows the way. For me inside my heart, things are flying to the morn. The light in my is always shining. The light in my heart is ever new. The light in my heart is always shining. I know this much is true. Light in my heart is always shining. Light in my heart is ever new. Light in my heart, oh this much is true. Let healing light surround me. Let healing light be healing light. Find a way into every crack and every tear.