Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Medical errors now third leading cause of death in United States (2016)

washingtonpost.com

38 pointsitbeho14 comments

My senior college project was to reduce surgeon error in an Opthamalogy department, and surgeons were definitely cagey about talking about errors. It happened to other surgeons but not them (but it did). They’re so scared of malpractice suits.

Cataract surgery is very quick, but apparently it does happen they will implant the wrong lens into the wrong eye.

The existing system at the time was a verbal one. Someone in the operating room would call out the lens model number, and the eye they were operating on, and everyone would confirm. The theory being safety in numbers. But they got it wrong sometimes.

So we suggested a barcode system, where the correct model is documented ahead of time. Then when the lens is picked for surgery, it would be scanned and the computer would say if it matches or not, and it would say which eye it was to be put in. There still could be error with data entry but it would be documented with clear ownership which should decrease error.

The interesting thing was in talking about the processes with surgeons, no one involved said errors ever happened there. Which makes sense - there’s only downside in doing so, but I can easily see why medical errors are hard to estimate.

Using an analogy, let's all wave "Defund Healthcare" banners!

How this compares to other countries?

I suspect that if some other country has exactly the same quality of medical care, more people die from medical errors in the US simply because doctors have incentive to order treatments even if risk/reward ratio does not justify it. Especially when patients are elderly.

More treatments leads to more errors with the same error/treatment ratio.

That Washington Post story is dated May 3, 2016 and now I'm wondering if that justifies flagging the post.

A 2016 study by Johns Hopkins found similar results: iatrogenesis kills 250,000 Americans each year[1].

"The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates."

Doctors don't keep a record of the people they kill, just like the military or the police doesn't keep track of the civilians they kill.

[1]https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...

No: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2020/02/10/medical-error-thi...

Authors can hum and haw over estimates all day, but at the end of the day if we don’t have required reporting we will never know. That would be a good first step.

Link to study? I’m curious if this is because of a rise in issues or because medical treatments have managed to reduce all other kinds. Relatedly, are these causes filtered out for where lack of medical intervention would have resulted in death anyway? I suspect not because that kind of data analysis is hard to perform.

If you look at the bar chart, you will see: 1. this third is much smaller than the first and second, 2. other categories are carefully divided small categories. The "third" is not a meaningful comparison. A meaningful one should be the percentage of medical errors among medical treatments.

I wonder how much of this is owed to the financialization of medicine where many patients especially in poorer areas are now not seeing a doctor but a 'nurse practitioner', where responsibilities are diffused by design.

My gut tells me it's mainly due to the patient-to-nurse/doctor ratio. Like how I manufacture bugs when being rushed through a sprint with to many "points" committed. If I can pay attention and think about the task at hand and see it through, my bugs reduce dramatically. On top of that the quality of the solution is much better.

The year 2016 should be added to the title.

But how many of these deaths matter?

Did the doctors actually kill them, or did they fail to prolong their life another few days of misery?

This is a poorly written statement but the point is valid.

Above, another commenter linked an analysis that showed 2/3 of “preventable desths” occurred in patients with a life expectancy of 3 months and that only 1/3 of the preventable deaths were for people with a life expectancy greater than 3 months.

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