We all know that heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death in America, but do you know the third? Some of you probably think it’s death by car accident or firearm, but you’d be wrong. It turns out that the third leading cause of death in the U.S. is medical error, but the reason you didn’t know that might actually be because someone is hiding that fact from you.
Why Didn’t I Know Medical Error Was the Third Leading Cause of Death?
In 1999, the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine released a controversial report. It estimated that up to 98,000 deaths in the U.S. were the result of medical errors, and at the time, few were willing to believe that estimate. Fast forward over a decade and the Department of Health and Human Services decided that it would run a similar study on Medicare patients. It found 180,000 deaths that it thought were linked to medical mistakes. So how are so many people dying every year due to medical errors, and nobody is saying anything about it? One professor from one of the country’s most elite medical institutions has a theory.
Martin Makary, a surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, says that the reason America doesn’t know about this medical error problem is because they are never reported. Right now, the medical community uses the International Classification of Disease Codes (ICD) to mark the cause of someone’s death. Though the ICD is very comprehensive, it only marks diseases and ailments for billing purposes. So these codes don’t actually record the cause of a death, which means when a medical error occurs, it is never recorded as the reason someone died.
Knowing this, Makary released the results of his own study, which estimates that in 2013 around 250,000 people died due to medical errors. However, until record keeping by the medical industry is updated, we won’t be able to confirm these estimates, and we also won’t be able to fix the problems that are causing these medical errors to happen. However, there are still solutions open to the people of America.
What Are the Most Common Medical Errors in The US?
1. Diagnostic Errors
Diagnostic errors, including missed, incorrect, or delayed diagnoses, are among the most common and consequential medical errors. They can lead to inappropriate treatment, delayed treatment, or no treatment at all, exacerbating the patient’s condition. Conditions like cancer, heart attack, and stroke are particularly prone to diagnostic errors. The reasons behind diagnostic errors can be complex, but the repercussions for a failure to diagnose cancer can be extreme. It’s no surprise then, that failure to diagnose cancer lawsuits has been on the rise over the past decade.
2. Medication Errors
Medication errors involve administering the wrong medication, incorrect dosage, or administering medication to the wrong patient. These errors can occur at any point in the medication process, from prescribing and dispensing to administering and monitoring. Factors contributing to medication errors include poor communication, illegible handwriting, confusion between drugs with similar names, poor medical knowledge or training, and inadequate systems for checking and dispensing medications.
3. Surgical Errors
Surgical errors, also known as “never events” when they are clearly identifiable and preventable, include wrong-site surgery, wrong-patient surgery, incorrect surgical procedures, and retained surgical instruments. These errors can result from a range of factors, including inadequate preoperative planning, miscommunication among surgical teams, fatigue, and failure to follow proper surgical protocols and safety checklists.
Finding A Medical Error Lawyer Near Me
Medical malpractice lawsuits often dig up these unreported errors, and they also spur lawmakers into fixing the problems that plague our medical system. The medical malpractice attorneys near me in Georgia at the McArthur Law Firm are a part of this solution too. So stick with our blog and learn even more about improving our nation’s healthcare. You can also tell us what you think by logging on to Twitter and Facebook.
