Recent headlines telling us that medical errors are now the third leading cause of death deliver as much “news” as headlines telling us that Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States. While the report in the BMJ — and the press release promoting it — sounded like researchers were on to something new, they were merely reminding us of old data.
To get their estimate that medical errors cause 251,454 deaths a year among hospitalized patients in the United States, the authors essentially averaged error-related death rates from four prior studies and then extrapolated it to the number of hospitalized patients today. There is nothing bad about that, but there’s nothing tremendously innovative about it, either. If the researchers had really wanted to update the estimate for the modern age, they should have dug into patient records and made tough decisions about which deaths were truly due to errors — in other words, they should have done their own analysis.
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