Report: Hospital Errors Affect One-Third of Patients

The number of "adverse events" in hospitals — injuries caused by medical error — could be 10 times es greater than previously thought, a new study reveals.

Dr. David C. Classen, a medical professor at the University of Utah, and his colleagues used a new method to look for adverse events, reviewing medical records for nearly 800 patients at three major American hospitals with "well-established operational patient safety programs."

They searched through paperwork to look for "triggers" indicating problems, including a stop order on medications, an abnormal lab result, or use of an antidote. When they found a trigger, they investigated further to see if there had been an error.

"Disturbingly, the method picked up 10 times more confirmed significant adverse events than other methods — and determined that adverse events occurred in one-third of hospital admissions, even in hospitals that had instituted advanced patient safety programs," Susan Dentzer writes in the April issue of the journal Health Affairs.

"To be sure, not all of these resulted in serious injuries to patients or deaths. But try to imagine the reaction if one of three patients arriving at hospitals were notified that something bad would happen during their stay — and that, to make matters worse, they might be stuck with higher hospital copayments as a result."

The research team was affiliated with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a Cambridge, Mass., think tank.

The researchers state: "Our study suggests that despite sizable investments and aggressive promotional efforts by local hospitals, [traditional] reporting systems fail to detect most adverse effects."

A much-publicized study in 1999 estimated that avoidable medical errors contributed to as many as 98,000 deaths at American hospitals each year.

The Los Angeles Times observes that based on the new study, "a dozen years later, quality of care remains a problem."