by
Glenda Fauntleroy, DOTmed News | August 24, 2011
From the August 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
For anyone requiring medical care in a hospital or clinic in the United States, the odds of having a mistake-free visit are not too comforting.
A study in the April issue of Health Affairs found one out of three people will experience some kind of medical mistake during their hospital stay. The finding, which is based on a new system for measuring hospital errors, is about 10 times higher than previous estimates using older methods.
But the issue of patient safety and quality health care is not a new one. Patient safety has always been of great concern for both the health care industry and the patients who put their trust in physicians, with an increased interest after the Institute of Medicine released its 1999 landmark report “To Err Is Human: building a safer health system.” The report revealed that at least 44,000, or perhaps as many as 98,000, people die each year from preventable medical errors. The IOM statistics made medical errors the eighth leading cause of death in the U.S., and the numbers still hold true more than a decade later.
One of the report’s main conclusions was “the majority of medical errors do not result from individual recklessness or the actions of a particular group,” but rather errors are commonly “caused by faulty systems, processes and conditions that lead people to make mistakes or fail to prevent them.”
These medical mistakes prove costly to patient health as well as the industry’s purse. In another study in the same April issue of Health Affairs, a Denver-based consulting firm estimated that in 2008, the annual cost of medical errors that harm patients was $17.1 billion, based on insurance claims filed that year.
The study found 10 types of medical errors were responsible for more than two-thirds of the total cost, with the most common errors resulting in bedsores, postoperative infections and constant back pain following back surgery.
Many patients who fall victim to these medical errors often sue the hospital or their doctors. A study in the June 15 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association found there were 10,739 malpractice claims paid on behalf of physicians in 2009. Of these paid claims, almost half (47 percent) were because of events that happened during an inpatient hospital stay.
Scott Eldredge, an attorney at Burg Simpson in Englewood, Colo., who specializes in medical malpractice, says although his firm reviews hundreds of potential cases each year, they only move forward with about 2 percent of the cases where true negligence can be proved.
