Study Estimates Medical Error Is Third Leading Cause of Death in USA

Credit: phaseonefoundation.org

Researchers at John Hopkins School of Medicine published a report in The BMJ earlier this month that estimates that preventable medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Medical error includes surgical complications that go unaddressed, misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis, and medication errors, such as giving a patient the wrong medicine or the right medicine in the wrong dose.

Death caused by medical error tallied an estimated 251, 454 in 2014, coming on the heels of heart disease (614, 348) and cancer (591, 699.) The study states that this unsettling statistic is a highly-informed estimate only due to current protocols around writing death certificates and the methods used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to report causes of death.

Medical errors in hospitals cost thousands of lives every year
(Credit: theguardian.com)

Currently, U.S. death certificates list cause of death as the reason a patient initially sought treatment, ProPublica reports. For example, if a patient presented with heart disease but died as the result of a medical error, the death certificate would list heart disease as the cause of death. While medical error is often noted as a contributing cause, the CDC does not include this information in its statistics, so the public is unaware of how prevalent the problem is. Hospitals and physician groups keep internal records; however, there is no nationwide system for tracking and recording errors that occur. Thus, government officials fail to recognize medical error as a significant public health issue comparable in magnitude to cancer and heart disease.

In an open letter to CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden, the study’s lead author, Martin A. Mackary, M.D., M.P.H., urged the CDC to take steps to address this deficiency and to begin listing medical error as the third leading cause of death in the United States.