This is a review of the article titled The Enormous Cost of Medical Errors by Bernard
Healey and Michele McGowan.
The Institute of Medicine reports that as many as 98,000 patients die each year from preventable medical errors. Medical errors are a serious problem which have gotten very little attention by leaders in the health care industry. In many instances physicians and hospitals are actually reimbursed for having the error and then reimbursed again for rectifying the error if the patient lived. These errors included diagnostic and treatment errors, surgical errors, drug errors, hospital acquired infections and delay in treatment to name a few. When these errors are investigated the cause quite often is lack of communication among health care staff. The lack of cooperation among employees in health care delivery systems is one of the major reasons for the epidemic of medical errors in medical care; too many patients are the victims of preventable medical errors and infections that occur in the hospital.
The article clearly supports the course material by citing the primary causes of medical errors and supporting them with statistical data. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) (1999) released a study revealing that as many as 98,000 of the 33 million individuals hospitalized each year die and many more receive secondary infections because of poor quality health care while hospitalized. Medical errors are estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death in the U.S. The percentage of hospital admissions experiencing injury or death is 2.9 percent on the low side and 3.7 percent on the high side. It is estimated that drug errors alone add $5,000 to the cost of every hospital admission, and that one third of our nation’s health care bill comes from the provision of unnecessary care. This unnecessary care not only costs over