[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Guest Commentary May 8, 2002
Avoidable Medical Errors Killing More People Than Auto Accidents
The Honorable Constance Morella
In late 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a major report on medical mistakes entitled "To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health Care System." This eye-opening study found that errors by health care professionals may result in the deaths of between 44,000 and 98,000 people in the United States every year, and injure countless others. Shockingly, more people die from avoidable medical errors each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS.
Congress reacted swiftly to the IOM report. Some members of the House and Senate, including myself, introduced bills to implement the report's recommendations, and hearings on medical errors were held in various committees. But Congress sometimes has a short attention span. Despite the flurry of activity at the beginning of 2000, by the close of the session other health care debates had crowded out the medical error issue and no further action was taken on medical errors.
Free Newsletter
Get the scoop on important legislation, Congressional action, election updates, hard-hitting political commentary, the latest developments in the War on Terror...and more! Just enter your email address below.
Privacy: Your name and email address will be confidential - never rented, never sold.
We cannot let another year go by without doing something about medical errors; therefore, I am reintroducing a medical errors bill and this time I plan to see it through to enactment. If the IOM estimate of the fatalities that result from medical errors is remotely close to accurate, Congress cannot wait another year to act.
According to the IOM, most medical errors do not result from individual recklessness, but from basic flaws in the way hospitals and other health care systems are organized. For example, deadly mistakes have resulted from stocking the patient-care units in hospitals with certain full-strength drugs that are toxic unless diluted. Confusion over similarly-named drugs is another major cause of medical mistakes: studies have shown, for instance, that confusion over the similarly-named drugs "Cefuroxime" and "Cefotaxime" accounted for numerous errors in the administration of these drugs.
Other errors result from the increased complexity and specialization of health care treatment. When a patient is treated by different doctors for different ailments, a particular practitioner may not have complete information about all treatments the patient is receiving, and may prescribe medication that is incompatible with other medications the patient is taking.
In recommending ways to reduce errors, the IOM focused on the need to encourage efficient and comprehensive reporting systems so that health care professionals can benefit from the experiences and "best practices" of their colleagues. Other sectors of the American economy have established coordinated safety programs that collect and analyze accident trends -- such programs are commonplace, for example, in the transportation field. Yet there are few centralized systems for gathering and disseminating information on medical errors. For this reason, in my legislation, I specifically advocate for the use of MedMARx -- a national, Internet-accessible reporting system designed to reduce medication errors in hospitals. This system allows hospitals to anonymously and voluntarily report, track, and monitor their medication errors, to identify trends, and to pinpoint problem areas. In order for systems like MedMARx to become successful though, participating hospitals and health care professionals must know that they can report problems encountered in clinical practice without endangering their careers. But according to the IOM, a major obstacle to the full implementation of medical error reporting programs is the threat that the reports themselves will be disclosed in civil litigation.
Naturally, hospitals are reluctant to generate documents that will be used against them in adversarial proceedings, so IOM called for enactment of an evidentiary privilege in federal law against the disclosure of information provided to medical error reporting systems. In the legislation, I would protect the confidentiality of data on medical mistakes where the information is collected and analyzed solely for the purpose of improving safety and quality. Without this protection, hospitals and health care professionals fear that information reported might ultimately be subpoenaed and used in lawsuits against them, thereby discouraging their participation.
The time to act is now. Patients are literally killed by medical errors every day, yet Congress has not done anything to ensure that the IOM recommendations that could significantly reduce these tragic mistakes are signed into law. Working together, we can reduce medical errors and improve the quality of patient care in the United States.
Constance Morella, a Republican, represents the 8th Congressional District of Maryland in the U.S. House of Representatives. The above commentary has been adapted from a speech Rep. Morella delivered on the floor of the House, May 7, 2002. To contact her, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
