As reported on National Public Radio (NPR) online, “A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine says medical errors should rank as the third-leading cause of death in the United States — and highlights how shortcomings in tracking vital statistics may hinder research and keep the problem out of the public eye. The authors, Johns Hopkins surgeon Martin Makary, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of surgery and health policy & management at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and his co-author, research assistant Michael Daniel, published an article Tuesday in The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal. The NPR article, by Marshall Allen and Olga Pierce, notes that, “Based on an analysis of prior research, the Johns Hopkins study estimates that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. On the CDC's official list, that would rank just behind heart disease and cancer, which each took about 600,000 lives in 2014, and in front of respiratory disease, which caused about 150,000 deaths,” for an estimated average of 400,000 deaths a year. “Medical mistakes that can lead to death range from surgical complications that go unrecognized to mix-ups with the doses or types of medications patients receive,” the authors add. But the problem is that no one knows exactly how many deaths are really caused by medical errors, in part because the coding system used by the CDC to record death certificate data “doesn't capture things like communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors and poor judgment that cost lives,” the NPR story notes.
Indeed, in The BMJ article itself, Dr. Makary and his co-author, research assistant Michael Daniel, note the following: “The most commonly cited estimate of annual deaths from medical error in the US—a 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report—is limited and outdated. The report describes an incidence of 44,000-98,000 deaths annually. This conclusion was not based on primary research conducted by the institute but on the 1984 Harvard Medical Practice Study and the 1992 Utah and Colorado Study. But as early as 1993, Leape, a chief investigator in the 1984 Harvard study, published an article arguing that the study’s estimate was too low, contending that 78 percent rather than 51 percent of the 180,000 iatrogenic deaths were preventable (some argue that all iatrogenic deaths are preventable).10 This higher incidence (about 140,400 deaths due to error) has been supported by subsequent studies which suggest that the 1999 IOM report underestimates the magnitude of the problem.”
In their article, Makary and Daniel went on to say, “A 2004 report of inpatient deaths associated with the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research Patient Safety Indicators in the Medicare population estimated that 575,000 deaths were caused by medical error between 2000 and 2002, which is about 195,000 deaths a year. Similarly, the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General examining the health records of hospital inpatients in 2008, reported 180,000 deaths due to medical error a year among Medicare beneficiaries alone. Using similar methods, Classen et al described a rate of 1.13 percent. If this rate is applied to all registered US hospital admissions in 2013, it translates to over 400,000 deaths a year, more than four times the IOM estimate.”
What’s more, Dr. Makary followed up the article in The BMJ by authoring a letter to Thomas Frieden, M.D., director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in which he said to Dr. Frieden, “Dear Dr. Frieden, We are writing this letter to respectfully ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change the way it collects our country’s national vital health statistics each year. The list of most common causes of death published is very important-it informs our country’s research and public health priorities each year. The current methodology used to generate the list as what we believe to be a serious limitation,” Dr. Makary stated. “As a result, the list has neglected to identify the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—medical error.”
