1 Out of 3 Hospital Patients Victims of Adverse Events


A new study in the April issue of Health Affairs claims flaws in the current methods of measuring medical errors in hospitals has led to significant under reporting:

ABSTRACT: Identification and measurement of adverse medical events is central to patient safety, forming a foundation for accountability, prioritizing problems to work on, generating ideas for safer care, and testing which interventions work. We compared three methods to detect adverse events in hospitalized patients, using the same patient sample set from three leading hospitals. We found that the adverse event detection methods commonly used to track patient safety in the United States today—voluntary reporting and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Patient Safety Indicators—fared very poorly compared to other methods and missed 90*percent of the adverse events. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Global Trigger Tool found at least ten times more confirmed, serious events… (Continued...)




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