04 | 16 | 2008 Posted By Regan Zambri & Long

Medical Errors Add Billions of Dollars to U.S. Healthcare Costs: New Study

Patient safety errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of U.S. Medicare patients and drove up the cost of the Medicare program by $8.8 billion from 2004 to 2006, according to the 5th Annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study.

A statistical analysis of 41 million Medicare patient records conducted by HealthGrades -- a health care ratings organization -- reveals that those patients who were treated at top-performing hospitals were generally 43% less likely to experience one or more medical errors than patients at the poorest-performing hospitals.  The overall error rate was roughly 3% for all Medicare patients, which averages to 1.1 million patient safety incidents over the course of the three years included in the analysis.

Among the other findings in the data analysis:

  • "Patients who experienced a patient safety incident had a 20 percent chance of dying as a result of the incident.
  • The overall death rate among patients who experienced one or more patient safety incidents fell by almost 5 percent between 2004 and 2006.
  • However, over that time, there were increases in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting.
  • The most common types of medical errors were bed sores, failure to rescue, and post-operative respiratory failure. Together, they accounted for 63.4 percent of incidents. Failure to rescue improved 11.1 percent from 2004 to 2006, while both bed sores and post-operative respiratory failure worsened during that time.
  • Of the 270,491 deaths that occurred among patients who experienced one or more patient safety incidents, 238,337 were potentially preventable, the researchers said.
  • If all hospitals performed at the level of the top-ranked hospitals, about 220,106 patient safety incidents and 37,214 patient deaths could have been avoided, and about $2 billion could have been saved."

Beginning on Oct. 1, 2008, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will no longer reimburse hospitals for treatment related to eight major preventable errors, including objects left in the body after surgery and certain kinds of surgery-related infections. 

Previously on the DC Metro Area Medical Malpractice Law Blog, we have posted articles related to:

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