About that Johns Hopkins study on medical errors (podcast)
Interview_with_Frank_Federico_-_Institute_for_Healthcare_Improvement.mp3
By now, you’ve probably heard about the Johns Hopkins study, published in BMJ, that called medical errors the third leading cause of death in the U.S. That works out to slightly more than 250,000 unnecessary deaths annually, or about 9.5 percent of all fatalities in the country.
It’s a staggering figure, far above the range of 44,000 to 98,000 preventable deaths in hospitals alone that the Institute of Medicine estimated in the seminal 1999 work, “To Err Is Human.” However, it’s not the first time someone has called medical error the No. 3 cause of death in the U.S. John T. James, founder of a group called Patient Safety America, did that in a 2013 report in the Journal of Patient Safety.
What’s different this time? Has anything changed for the better since 1999?
Frank Federico, a vice president at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement — the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based organization founded by Dr. Donald M. Berwick — has plenty of thoughts on this study and those questions. He shares them in this podcast.
Filed under: General Problems
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