251,000 lives lost yearly in US due to medical errors, making it third-leading cause of death

About 251,000 people in the US die yearly due to medical errors, an analysis of patient safety reveals. The study, published in the BMJ on Tuesday, places medical mistakes as the third leading cause of death in the country.

That would mean those errors kill more than respiratory ailments, Alzheimer’s, stroke and accidents. Medical errors cover from wrong diagnoses made by bad doctors to breakdown in communications as patients are moved from one department to another.

This has resulted in recent headlines when surgeons perform the procedure on a wrong patient and nurses give the wrong medicine to the sick. Martin Makary, lead researcher and professor of surgery at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine, explains, “It boils down to people dying from the care that they receive rather than the disease for which they are seeing care,” quotes The Washington Post.

The 251,000 estimate is more than double the 98,000 deaths due to medical errors cited by an Institute of Medicine report in 1999. The new research analysed four large studies, including those done by the Office of the Inspector General’s Health and Human Services Department and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, from 2000 through 2008.

It translates into 700 people dying daily due to the medical errors. The two other leading causes of deaths in the US higher than medical errors are heart diseases at 614,348 and cancer at 591,699.

Medscape notes that deaths by medical errors are not captured in death certificates, used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in ranking causes of death in the US. The certificates depend on the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes. The ICD code is used by 117 nations as the primary health status indicator, says the World Health Organisation.

Makary explains, “The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used.” The authors suggested the inclusion of an extra field in death certificates stating if a preventable complication due to patient care contributed to the death.