Medical Error Is Now Third Leading Cause of Death in US

Ranking just below heart disease and cancer, medical error is now the third leading cause of death for Americans according to findings published last week in the international medical journal BMJ.

Authors of the study say the disturbing findings point to a need to make studying medical errors and their prevention more of a priority. One barrier to conducting more research on the topic, however, is that medical errors often are not accurately reported on death certificates—the primary document the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses to rank cause of death and set health priorities. Currently, death certificates use ICD codes to list cause of death and there is no ICD code for human or medical systems error.

"Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven't been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics,” said Martin Makary, MD, MPH, one of the study’s authors and professor of surgery from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. “The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used."

For the study, Makary and co-author Michael Daniel, analyzed four different studies that included medical death rate data between 2000 and 2008. They also used hospital admission rates from 2013 to extrapolate that of 35,416,020 hospitalizations, 251,454 deaths were the result of a medical error. That finding puts medical error ahead of respiratory disease as the third leading causing of death. In 2013, only 149,205 people died of chronic respiratory disease according to the CDC while 611,105 people died of heart disease and 584,881 people died of cancer.

The study’s authors say reform is needed to bring the problem of medical errors to the forefront and to reduce the rate of errors. One change they recommend is including an additional field on death certificates that asks if a “preventable complication stemming from the patient's care contributed to the death.”

Another change they propose is more transparency from hospitals surrounding medical errors including independent investigations into cause of death. They say taking a root cause analysis approach would help protect anonymity while still accurately reporting the problem.

"It's public pressure that brings about change,” said Jim Rickert, MD, an orthopedist in Bedford, Indiana, and president of the Society for Patient Centered Orthopedics. “Hospitals have no incentive to publicize errors; neither do doctors or any other provider."

To learn more, read the entire article.