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bmj.com 03 May 2016 Medical error - the 3rd leading cause of death in the US

Washington Post “medical errors” incredibly common
Nightmare stories of nurses giving potent drugs meant for one patient to another and surgeons removing the wrong body parts have dominated recent headlines about medical care. Lest you assume those cases are the exceptions, a new study by patient-safety researchers provides some context. Their analysis, published in the BMJ on Tuesday, shows that “medical errors” in hospitals and other health-care facilities are incredibly common and may now be the third-leading cause of death in the United States — claiming 251,000 lives every year, more than respiratory disease, accidents, stroke and Alzheimer’s.

Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the research, said in an interview that the category includes everything from bad doctors to more systemic issues such as communication breakdowns when patients are handed off from one department to another. “It boils down to people dying from the care that they receive rather than the disease for which they are seeking care,” Makary said.

Consumer Reports recently investigated California licensing records and found that many doctors who were still practicing were on probation for serious violations of patient safety.
Science Daily The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC's way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates. "Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven't been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics," says Martin Makary, M.D., M.P.H., professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform. "The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used."
CBS News "medical care gone awry" evaluated four separate studies that analyzed medical death rate data from 2000 to 2008, the findings, published in The BMJ, come from an analysis of death rate records spanning 8 years. Based on 2013 data on hospitalization rates, they found that of 35,416,020 hospitalizations, 251,454 deaths stemmed from a medical error. They said that adds up to 9.5 percent of all deaths a year in the U.S.

Study author Dr. Martin Makary, surgical director of the Johns Hopkins Multidisciplinary Pancreas Clinic and a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, said rates for deaths related to "medical care gone awry" aren't tracked in a standardized way. Because of that, deaths due to medical errors aren't tallied in the same way as heart disease, cancer and other conditions are when it comes to national statistics on causes of death.

Makary told CBS News that national mortality statistics are calculated using billing codes, which don't have a built-in way to recognize incidence rates of mortality due to medical errors.

more than 250,000 hospital patients die every year from medical care errors Doctors at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine released the study this week in the British Medical Journal. It calculated that more than 250,000 hospital patients die every year from medical care errors. Since the Centers for Disease Control does not classify medical errors separately on death certificates, one of the researches said the numbers in the analysis are conservative.

The research shows 9.5 percent of all deaths in the U.S. stem from preventable complications inside hospitals.

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Image courtesy BMJ, Washington Post, and Consumer Report