Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease and cancer, according to findings
published today in
BMJ.
Medical error has been defined as an unintended act (either of omission
or commission) or one that does not achieve its intended outcome,
the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended (an error
of execution), the use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim (an error of
planning), or a deviation from the process of care that may or may not cause harm to the patient.
Patient harm from medical error can occur at the individual or system
level. The taxonomy of errors is expanding to better categorize
preventable factors and events.
The autors focussed on preventable lethal events to highlight the scale of potential for improvement.
As
such, medical errors should be a top priority for research and
resources, say authors Martin Makary, MD, MPH, professor of surgery, and
research fellow Michael Daniel, from Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.
But accurate, transparent
information about errors is not captured on death certificates, which
are the documents the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
uses for ranking causes of death and setting health priorities. Death
certificates depend on International Classification of Diseases (ICD)
codes for cause of death, so causes such as human and system errors are
not recorded on them.
And it's not just the US. According to the
World Health Organization, 117 countries code their mortality statistics
using the ICD system as the primary health status indicator.
The authors call for better reporting to help capture the scale of the problem and create strategies for reducing it.
Cancer and Heart Disease Get the Attention
"Top-ranked
causes of death as reported by the CDC inform our country's research
funding and public health priorities," Dr Makary said in an university
press release. "Right now, cancer and heart disease get a ton of
attention, but since medical errors don't appear on the list, the
problem doesn't get the funding and attention it deserves."
He adds: "Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical
care gone awry haven't been recognized in any standardized method for
collecting national statistics. The medical coding system was designed
to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national
health statistics, as it is currently being used."
The researchers
examined four studies that analyzed medical death rate data from 2000
to 2008. Then, using hospital admission rates from 2013, they
extrapolated that, based on 35,416,020 hospitalizations, 251,454 deaths
stemmed from a medical error.
That number of deaths translates to
9.5% of all deaths each year in the US — and puts medical error above
the previous third-leading cause, respiratory disease.
In
2013, 611,105 people died of heart disease, 584,881 died of cancer, and
149,205 died of chronic respiratory disease, according to the CDC.
The
new estimates are considerably higher than those in the 1999 Institute
of Medicine report "To Err Is Human." However, the authors note that the
data used for that report "is limited and outdated."
Strategies for Change
The
authors suggest several changes, including making errors more visible
so their effects can be understood. Often, discussions about prevention
occur in limited and confidential forums, such as a department's
morbidity and mortality conference.
Another
is changing death certificates to include not just the cause of death,
but an extra field asking whether a preventable complication stemming
from the patient's care contributed to the death.
The authors also
suggest that hospitals carry out a rapid and efficient independent
investigation into deaths to determine whether error played a role. A
root cause analysis approach would help while offering the protection of
anonymity, they say.
Standardized data collection and reporting are also needed to build an accurate national picture of the problem.
Jim Rickert, MD, an orthopedist in Bedford, Indiana, and president of the Society for Patient Centered Orthopedics, told
Medscape Medical News he was not surprised the errors came in at number 3 and that even those calculations don't tell the whole story.
"That
doesn't even include doctors' offices and ambulatory care centers," he
notes. "That's only inpatient hospitalization resulting in errors."
"I think most people underestimate the risk of error when they seek medical care," he said.
He
agrees that adding a field to death certificates to indicate medical
error is likely the way to get medical errors the attention they
deserve.
"It's public pressure
that brings about change. Hospitals have no incentive to publicize
errors; neither do doctors or any other provider," he said.
However,
such a major step as adding error information to death certificates is
unlikely if not accompanied by tort reform, he said.
Still, this study helps emphasize the prevalence of errors, he said.
Human
error is inevitable, the authors acknowledge, but "we can better
measure the problem to design safer systems mitigating its frequency,
visibility, and consequences."
They
add that most errors aren't caused by bad doctors but by systemic
failures and should 'not be addressed with punishment or legal action.
BMJ. Published online May 3, 2016.
