Sidestep Hospital Errors

Look at your monthly insurance bill and one fact is abundantly clear: you’re paying dramatically more for health care now than you did a decade ago, though it is difficult to say if you’re getting better care. 

In fact, you probably know more about the quality of the flat-screen TV on your living room wall than the safety record of your local hospital—yet your life could depend on this knowledge.  In 1999, the Institute of Medicine reported that as many as 98,000 Americans each year die from preventable errors in hospitals. 

Standards Designed to Save Lives
Thanks to pressure from the Leapfrog Group, this situation is changing.  The Leapfrog Group is a growing consortium of major companies and other health care purchasers that provide benefits to more than 37 million Americans in all 50 states.  They have identified three quality and safety practices that could avoid more than 900,000 medical errors annually, saving 65,000 lives—and reducing health care expenditures by $41.5 billion. 

As an individual consumer, you can benefit from their work by finding out which hospitals in your area have adopted or are in the process of adopting the Leapfrog recommendations:

• Computer Physician Order Entry (CPOE).  With CPOE systems, hospital staff members enter medication orders via a computer linked to software designed to catch errors. CPOE has been shown to reduce serious prescribing errors in hospitals by more than 50 percent.
• Evidence-Based Hospital Referral (EHR).  Consumers should choose hospitals with extensive experience and the best results with high-risk surgeries and conditions based on scientifically valid criteria such as the number of times a hospital performs these procedures each year.  Research indicates that a patient’s risk of dying could be reduced by 40 percent.
• ICU Physician Staffing (IPS).  Staffing ICUs with doctors who have special training in critical care medicine, called “intensivists,” has been shown to reduce the risk of patients dying in the ICU by 40 percent.