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How Medical Mistakes are Costing U.S. Healthcare $8.8 Billion

When the healthcare industry points the finger at trial lawyers for the rising costs of American healthcare, maybe the lawyers ought to tell them to look in the mirror. A new study from HealthGrades reports that patient safety incidents in America’s hospitals are cost federal Medicare program $8.8 billion between 2004 and 2006. What’s more, these patient safety incidents resulted in an 238,337 potentially preventable deaths!

HealthGrades, an agency that rates doctors, hospitals, and other health care organizations, released their Fifth Annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals study. The results show that roughly 3% of all Medicare patients will experience some patient safety incident during the course of their treatment.

“Patient-safety incident” was defined as:

· Accidental puncture or laceration

· Complications of anesthesia

· Death in low-mortality DRGs

· Decubitus ulcer (bed sores)

· Failure to rescue

· Foreign body left in during procedure

· Iatrogenic pneumothorax

· Selected infections due to medical care

· Post-operative hemorrhage or hematoma

· Post-operative hip fracture

· Post-operative physiologic metabolic derangement

· Post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis

· Post-operative respiratory failure

· Post-operative sepsis

· Post-operative abdominal wound dehiscence

· Transfusion reaction

Patients who suffered from one or more of these complications were subsequently at a 20% greater chance of dying

Medical errors with the highest incidence rates were bed sores, failure to rescue, and post-operative respiratory failure. These three accounted for 63.4 percent of all incidents.

Strikingly, the study concluded that if all the hospitals from which data were pulled had performed at the level of Distinguished Hospitals for Patient Safety, approximately 220,106 patient safety incidents would have been prevented and 37,214 deaths would have been avoided. The savings to the United States would be a whopping $2.0 billion over the course of three years.

So when health care professionals argue that the rising costs of medical malpractice litigation and insurance are causing healthcare to become more expensive for the average American, remind them that their own mistakes could have saved $2.0 billion.

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