Medical Errors: Our Third-Leading Cause of Death

If medical errors were a disease, they’d rank as America’s third leading cause of death.

That’s the alarming conclusion from a BMJ study led by Johns Hopkins’ Martin Makary, MD. However, U.S. death certificates do not acknowledge medical errors, making it difficult to know precisely how lethal their toll is. Makary and coauthor Michael Daniel urge revision of our system for measuring national vital statistics to enable better understanding of deaths due to medical care.

“The most commonly cited estimate of annual deaths from medical error in the U.S.—a 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report—is limited and outdated,” they say. That report estimated 44,000–98,000 deaths from medical error each year. By 1993 even one of its authors said that number was too low. Other calculations have approached 200,000 annually, and a methodology published by David Classen, et al., in Health Affairs in 2011 could push it as high as 400,000. Using a mean from studies since the IOM report and extrapolating based on 2013 hospital admissions, Makary and Daniel estimate 251,454 U.S. deaths from medical error each year.

Even that, they wrote, likely “understates the true incidence…because the studies cited rely on errors extractable in documented health records and include only inpatient deaths.”

For more: https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.