Hospitals are dangerous places

Eleven years have passed since the landmark 1999 Institute of Medicine report, "To Err is Human," came out with a guesstimate that up to 98,000 people are killed by hospital errors each year. That number is low compared to an estimate in a report issued this week by the Office of the Inspector General. According to that analysis, hospitals kill 180,000 people with medical errors each year.

To be specific, that number is conservative because it represents Medicare beneficiaries only. Even so, the death toll is the equivalent of one sardine-packed Boeing 747 crashing every day. If that happened, we'd hear about it for sure. It would be all over the news. When a metal can falls out of the sky, it gets our attention.

But these hospital-related deaths barely register. What goes on behind the doors of the hospital usually stays hidden. So-called "never" events or horrible mistakes like the one where a surgeon performed the wrong surgery on a person are rarely publicized. Yet more transparency might help us tackle adverse events--especially the preventable ones.

But if you can't talk about medical errors openly, how do you address the problem?

 From Sandra Yin at Fierce Healthcare