Home > News

TUESDAY, July 27 (HealthDayNews) -- An estimated 195,000 people in the United States die each year due to potentially preventable medical errors in hospitals, a new report contends.

That's almost twice the number reported by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in its landmark 1999 report, To Err Is Human, which cited 98,000 preventable deaths each year.

According to HealthGrades Inc., a health-quality ratings company that produced the latest report, the death toll is equivalent to three fully loaded jumbo jets crashing every other day for the last five years. That would make hospital medical errors the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States, after diabetes, influenza, pneumonia, Alzheimer's disease and kidney disease.

IOM representatives acknowledge that the actual number of medical errors occurring in the nation's hospitals may be more than was reported in 1999.

"We have always stated that the estimates published in To Err Is Human are probably conservative estimates," said Christine Stencel, an IOM spokeswoman.

But one author of the IOM study points to several methodological problems with the new report that could have inflated the findings.

The HealthGrades report used 16 of 20 "Patient Safety Indicators" developed by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to screen hospital administrative data for safety-related incidents from 2000 through 2002.

In all, the report looked at 37 million Medicare patient records, representing about 45 percent of all hospital admissions in the United States -- not including obstetrics patients.

Medicare is the federal health insurance program for people 65 or older, some disabled people under 65 years of age, and those with end-stage renal disease -- permanent kidney failure.

There were about 1.14 million "safety-related incidents" associated with 323,993 deaths in hospitals during the period reviewed by HealthGrades, which is based in Denver. Eighty-one percent of those deaths were directly attributable to the incident.

And one in every four Medicare patients who experienced an incident died, the report found.

"Failure to rescue" (which refers to failure to diagnose and treat conditions that develop in a hospital), bedsores, and postoperative sepsis accounted for almost 60 percent of all " safety-related incidents," according to the report.

The report's authors said these errors accounted for $8.54 billion in excess costs to the Medicare system over the three years studied. If that number were extrapolated to the entire United States, it would mean an extra $19 billion was spent and more than 575,000 preventable deaths occurred from 2000 to 2002, the authors concluded.

That information, however, should not be extrapolated, other health experts said.

"Medicare patients have a higher adverse event rate because they have a lot more treatments, they're sicker, they have multiple diseases, so the mortality rate, the error rate, all these things are higher," said Dr. Lucian Leape, adjunct professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, and one of the authors of the IOM report.

Furthermore, he added, "failure to rescue" is not normally used in calculating deaths from medical errors; it's not an accepted standard.

Regardless of the actual number of medical errors in this country, authors of both the current and previous study agree something needs to be done.

"The magnitude of this is significant. We need to address this and we need to have support from the medical community," said Dr. Samantha Collier, lead author of the new report and vice president of medical affairs at HealthGrades.

"I think it's a safe bet to say that we've maybe gotten a little complacent about patient safety in the medical community, and this is just re-sparking and refueling debate around how to address this. Hopefully, it is creating a sense of urgency, " she said.

Leape added, "Most of us would like to see the attention off counting numbers and [on to] why aren't we doing more to improve safety, which is really the issue."

More information

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has more on medical errors.

(SOURCES: Samantha Collier, M.D., vice president of medical affairs, HealthGrades, Inc., Denver; Lucian Leape, M.D., adjunct professor of health policy, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston; Christine Stencel, spokeswoman, Institute of Medicine, Washington, D.C.; July 27, 2004, HealthGrades report)

Copyright © 2004 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.