Medical Errors Cost Billions...And Lives!

Dan Frith

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From 2004 through 2006, HealthGrades, a health care ratings organization, found that patient safety errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of U.S. Medicare patients and cost the Medicare program $8.8 billion.  The HealthGrades published its findings in the fifth annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study.

The study found that patients treated at top-performing hospitals were 43 percent less likely to experience one or more medical errors than patients at the poorest-performing hospitals.  The overall medical error rate was about 3 percent for all Medicare patients, which works out to about 1.1 million patient safety incidents during the three years included in the analysis.

I don't know about you...but these numbers are too damn high for me!