Medical Mistakes

How Many Die from Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals?

An updated estimate says it could be at least 210,000 patients a year, more than twice the number in a frequently quoted Institute of Medicine report

By Marshall Allen and ProPublica

By combining the findings and extrapolating across 34 million hospitalizations in 2007, James concluded that preventable errors contribute to the deaths of 210,000 hospital patients annually.

That is the baseline. The actual number more than doubles, James reasoned, because the trigger tool doesn't catch errors in which treatment should have been provided but wasn't, because it's known that medical records are missing some evidence of harm, and because diagnostic errors aren't captured.

An estimate of 440,000 deaths from care in hospitals "is roughly one-sixth of all deaths that occur in the United States each year," James wrote in his study. He also cited other research that's shown hospital reporting systems and peer-review capture only a fraction of patient harm or negligent care./.../