Report: Medical Errors are likely in Top 3 Causes of Death in US

Deaths from preventable medical errors cause between 200,000 and 400,000 people each year to die in the U.S.

Dr. Martin Makary and Michael Daniel of Johns Hopkins University medical school argued that a careful count of all medical mistakes — from surgical disasters to accidental drug overdoses — would account for the No. 3 cause of death in the U.S., behind cancer and heart disease.

“If medical error was a disease, it would rank as the third leading cause of death in the U.S.,” they wrote in an analysis published in the British Medical Journal’s online publication The BMJ.

Cancer and heart disease are the top 2 causes of death in the United States. In 2012, 24 percent of all deaths were from heart disease, 599,711 in total. Another 582,623 deaths (23 percent) were from cancer.

The current number three cause, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD, with 149,000 deaths.

The findings from this new study estimate of 250,000 deaths a year would put it into the Top 3 spot as a leading cause.

“We spend a lot of money on cancer and heart disease but we have not even recognized that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States,” Makary told NBC News.

Health policy experts and many doctors have been trying to call attention to the problem of medical errors for more than a decade. In 1999 the Institute of Medicine released a landmark report estimating that as many as 98,000 people died every year from medical errors.

“A big part of the challenge is that medical errors are not usually put down on death certificates”, said Makary. “Our national health statistics puts out a list of most common causes of death in the United States each year. That list is a big deal. It informs all of our research funding priorities and all of our public health campaigns.”

That list is called the International Classification of Disease (ICD) code. “The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used,” Makary said.

Makary and Daniel used four studies that analyzed medical death rate data from 2000 to 2008, including one by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. From this analysis, there was an estimate of 250,000 deaths a year from medical errors.

“That places it well above the current number three cause of death even using the lowest estimate,” Makary said.

The hope is that these new findings bring attention to the number of deaths from Medical Error and increase the diligence of surgeons and attending physicians. The aim is not to place blame on those causing the errors, but to assess what can be done to reduce them in a systematic way.