Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US
Citation: Martin A Makary, Michael Daniel (2016/05/03) Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US. BMJ (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1136/bmj.i2139
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1136/bmj.i2139
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1136/bmj.i2139
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US
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Summary
Authors "calculated a mean rate of death from medical error of 251,454 a year using the studies reported since the 1999 IOM report and extrapolating to the total number of US hospital admissions in 2013" which would make medical error the 3rd leading cause of death in the US. Authors believe this an underestimate as studies used include only inpatient deaths and rely on errors that can be extracted from health records.
Suggest strategies to reduce death from medical care:
- make errors more visible
- have remedies at hand
- make errors less frequent
Suggest strategies to improve accuracy of counting death from medical error:
- "death certificates could contain an extra field asking whether a preventable complication stemming from the patient’s medical care contributed to the death"
- "hospitals to carry out a rapid and efficient independent investigation into deaths to determine the potential contribution of error"
- standardized data collection and reporting processes
