According to the university, as reported by the US News, there are almost 400,000 patients die due to these errors per year.
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Writing in The BMJ, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University say more than 250,000 deaths are caused by medical errors every year.
On a death certificate, a person’s cause of death is recorded by a billing code, and medical errors aren’t on the list of options, Makary says.
The researchers examined four separate studies that analyzed medical death rate data from 2000 to 2008. “Our national health statistics…do not take medical care gone wrong as a cause of death”, he says. They then used hospital admission rates from 2013 and extrapolated how many deaths stemmed from medical errors. “More research on preventing medical errors from occurring is needed to address the problem”.
The researchers argue these errors are responsible for more deaths in the U.S.
Martin Makary, MD, lead author of the study, says the discrepancy comes from the way the US compiles national health statistics.
Authors of the paper, Dr Martin A. Makary and Michael Daniels-along with two other John Hopkins affiliates-penned a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), asking the federal agency to “change the way it collects our country’s national vital health statistics”. “That’s not even counting people that die at home or sometimes through limited insurance networks or cracks in the system that result in deaths”, Makary told the CBS cable on Wednesday.
Such a flawless standardization is not embraced in hospitals, Sands said, which makes it hard to know exactly where medical errors are happening and how to solve the problem. Researchers from John Hopkins came up with the conclusion after doing a review of the causes of death based as per CDC’s death certificate database.
“It boils down to people dying from the care that they receive rather than the disease for which they are seeking care”, Makary said. Heart disease was the top killer that year with 614,348 deaths, and cancer ranked second with 591,699 deaths. Doctors are calling for a better reporting system that would more accurately reflect the number of medical errors and their effect.
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The true cause of death is often not reported because it does not fit the vague coding system, doctors said. Better tracking would improve funding and public recognition of the problem, she said.
