Medical Errors Are Third Leading Cause of Death

Thinking about going under the knife? Think about this: Researchers at Johns Hopkins who studied eight years of medical death rates believe that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. A Johns Hopkins news release reports that researchers put the number of people killed by errors somewhere north of 250,000. Why did it take so long to figure that out? Because, says says Martin Makary, professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform, “The medical coding system was designed to maximize billing for physician services, not to collect national health statistics, as it is currently being used.” Of course. Johns Hopkins reports that the researchers examined four separate studies that analyzed medical death rate data from 2000 to 2008. Then, using hospital admission rates from 2013, they extrapolated that based on a total of 35,416,020 hospitalizations, 251,454 deaths stemmed from a medical error, which the researchers say now translates to 9.5 percent of all deaths each year in the U.S. According to the CDC, in 2013, 611,105 people died of heart disease, 584,881 died of cancer, and 149,205 died of chronic respiratory disease—the top three causes of death in the U.S. The newly calculated figure for medical errors puts this cause of death behind cancer but ahead of respiratory disease. Read more in the British Medical Journal.