Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Medical error ranks third as leading cause of deaths in United States.

A recent paper published in the BMJ ranks Medical error as the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

CDC compiles the annual list of the most common cause of deaths in USA, based on death certificates filled out by physicians, funeral directors, medical examiners, and coroners. 

The health care provider fills the certificates using an International Classification of Disease (ICD) code to the cause of death, and unfortunately no ICD-10 code exists at present for human and system factors.

According to an article published in Journal of patient safety, premature deaths associated with preventable harm to patients was estimated at more than 400,000 per year costing the nation a colossal $1 trillion each year.

There's also the 10,000 serious complications cases resulting from medical errors that occur each day, beside the 1000 death each day.

"Medicine today invests heavily in information technology, yet the promised improvement in patient safety and productivity frankly have not been realized," said Peter Pronovost, MD, senior vice president for Patient Safety and Quality and director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins.

According to authors although human error is inevitable, but steps can certainly be taken to reduce its frequency and severity. They suggest making error made and lesson learnt more visible instead of conducting closed door mortality meetings, so that healthcare staff is more aware of such complications.But all these requires a robust data which is difficult in the absence of standardized  collection and reporting at the national level.

The death certificate can be changed to include an extra column requiring to address whether a preventable complication have contributed to the cause of death.

Increasing trained healthcare staff to rescue patients and limiting human error by always following set protocols in handling an emergency situation.

Beside USA, medical errors are also leading cause of deaths in Canada and UK. About 117 other countries in the world also code the cause of death using ICD codes, using it as an indicator of health status. ICD-10 also has limited codes to capture the cause of mortality.

The authors suggest that when a medical error occurs, the physiological cause of death along with the error leading to it should be captured.

At the same time the statistics relating to medical error death should be shared nationally and internationally as other research is shared, creating a common platform to heightened awareness.  

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