Researchers Find Medical Error Deaths Overestimated

Recent reports that medical errors are killing as many as 100,000 patients annually in U.S. hospitals have been explored by researchers at the U.S. Veterans Administration Ann Arbor Healthcare System (MI, USA), who conclude that the number of patients who die from errors has been greatly overestimated. Their study was published in the July 25, 2001, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The researchers reviewed medical records from 1995-1996 and conducted 383 reviews of 111 hospital deaths at seven medical centers, over-sampling for markers associated with high rates of preventable deaths. Terminally ill patients who received comfort care were excluded. The reviewers estimated whether deaths could have been prevented by optimal care and estimated the probability that patients would have lived to discharge or for three months longer if care had been optimal.

The researchers estimated that only 0.5% of patients who died would have lived three months or more in good health if care had been optimal, representing about one patient per 10,000 hospital admissions, for a total of 5,000 –15,000 deaths annually. They concluded that previous studies may have been flawed and that estimates of error-related deaths were probably misleading. The authors of previous studies contend that the VA study was limited and over-analytical and that deaths caused by medical errors are much higher than this new estimate.