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(More customer reviews)The National Academy Institute of Medicine reports in their new book "To Err is Human":
"Two large studies, one conducted in Colorado and Utah and the other in New York, found that adverse events occurred in 2.9 and 3.7 percent of hospitalizations, respectively. In Colorado and Utah hospitals, 8.8 percent of adverse events led to death, as compared with 13.6 percent in New York hospitals. In both of these studies, over half of these adverse events resulted from medical errors and could have been prevented. When extrapolated to the over 33.6 million admissions to U.S. hospitals in 1997, the results of the study in Colorado and Utah imply that at least 44,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical errors. The results of the New York Study suggest the number may be as high as 98,000. Even when using the lower estimate, deaths due to medical errors exceed the number attributable to the 8th leading cause of death. More people die in a given year as a result of medical errors than from motor vehicle accidents (43,458), breast cancer (42,297), or AIDS (16,516)."
These are only confirmed and documented hospital deaths induced by error (wrong medication, wrong operation, failure to deal with documented symptomology, etc.) For example, Millenson points out one study that showed in a single hospital there were 51000 errors in a year and only 36 reported. There are at least 180,000 deaths and over a million injuries caused by medical error every year in the U.S. Many professionals (including the reviewer who was funded by NIH for eight years to do risk analysis in healthcare) believe that these numbers are severely undereported and that medical error is the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.
This book is the best available overview on the topic. If you value your life you will read it. The patient must take responsibility for monitoring treatment. If the patient is unable, family or friends must closely monitor it. Every time I give a talk on this subject someone in the audience has a personal horror story to share. Last month it was the son of the Chair of a conference I was attending whose child had a brain tumor and was in surgery the week before my talk. After surgery, the nurse was about to overdose the kid on morphine. A family member had been sleeping with the child in the hospital and logging every medication in a notebook. When they showed the log to the nurse and prevented her from administering the drug, she was shocked.
These stories are not isolated events. If airlines were like hospitals, every time 200 people disembarked from a flight, 7 passengers would be injured or dead.
The most tragic part of this story is that if healthcare institutions where automated like most industries, over 50% of these errors would disappear the first day they turned on the computers.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Demanding Medical Excellence: Doctors and Accountability in the Information Age
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