Routine Medical Procedures and Medical Errors

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While wrong-site surgeries or birth injuries grab the majority of news headlines, there are plenty of routine medical procedures, diagnostic tests, and non-surgical procedures that cause injury or death and are the result of serious medical errors. “In the past, patient safety efforts have focused on inpatient areas, such as the operating room,” says Tejal Gandhi, MD, President National Patient Safety Foundation. “Now, however, medical procedures are frequently performed in settings outside of the hospital, with an increased number of adverse events being identified. We need to translate the lessons learned in hospital safety to these other settings of care to ensure that procedures are performed as safely as possible.” According to the Sacramento Bee, “These medical procedure-related cases were filed from 2007-2011 and represent $215M in incurred losses. Unfortunately, for thousands of patients each year, seemingly benign screening, diagnostic, or therapeutic procedures lead to a significant injury or death. And, while more than two thirds of the injuries were relatively minor or temporary, 14 percent of the procedure cases involved patients who died. CRICO Strategies CBS database currently holds 275,000 medical malpractice cases from 500 hospitals and provides a unique insight into what goes wrong, and why. Analyzing malpractice data offers health care providers opportunities to change specific clinical systems or clinician behaviors and reduce those dominant risks.” CRICO Strategies is a division of the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions, Inc., a CRICO company. CRICO, a recognized leader in evidence-based risk management, is a group of companies owned by and serving the Harvard medical community. Established in 1998, Strategies extends CRICO’s patient safety mission through broad dissemination of products and services designed to reduce medical errors and malpractice exposure.

Holly Haines
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