In the 21 years since the National Academy of Medicine published To Err is Human, there has been significant effort to improve safety and reduce the variation in health outcomes in the United States. Still, an estimated 1.2 million are harmed each year by medical errors made in U.S. hospitals. We outline below necessary steps to change this.
4 Actions to Reduce Medical Errors in U.S. Hospitals
An estimated 1.2 million patients are harmed each year by preventable mistakes.
April 20, 2022
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Summary.
Huge numbers of patients are harmed in U.S. hospital by safety errors. Their numbers could be greatly reduced by taking four actions: Make patient safety a top priority in hospitals’ practices and cultures, establish a National Patient Safety Board, create a national patient and staff reporting mechanism, and turn on EHRs machine learning systems that can alert staff to risky conditions.