Preventable medical mistakes and infections are responsible for about 200,000 deaths in
the U.S. each year, according to an
investigation by the Hearst media corporation. The report comes 10 years after the
Institute of Medicine's "To
Err Is Human" analysis, which found that 44,000 to 98,000 people were dying
annually due to these errors and called for the medical community and government to cut
that number in half by 2004.
The precise number of these deaths is still unknown because many states lack a standard or
mandatory reporting system for injuries due to medical
mistakes. The investigative team gathered disparate medical records, legal documents,
personnel files and reports and analyzed databases to arrive at its estimate.
Many, including President Barack Obama, have advocated for a broader adoption of
electronic medical records as both a life- and cost-saver.
But not everyone is convinced that current technology will help doctors and nurses who
already have set ways of handling patient information. "The systems as they stand now
are still fairly clunky and user unfriendly," Robert Wachter, a professor of hospital
medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Hearst.
"In the last several years, we've seen a literature emerge of medical errors caused
by computer systems."
Some think that despite the grim numbers, patient safety has improved overall since the
1999 report. "Now, you have checklists prior to surgery; you mark the spot on which
limb you were going to operate on," Mary Stefl, dean of health care administration at
Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, told Hearst. "And afterwards, they count
the surgical sponges and instruments so they presumably don’t leave anything inside.
But it still happens."
In fact, according to Phil Bronstein, who led the investigation, "The annual medical
error death toll is higher than that for fatal car crashes," he said in a
prepared statement. (Scientific
American, 8.10.2009) http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=deaths-from-avoidable-medical-error-2009-08-10