Are Medical Errors Costing You Your Health
Are errors along the medical “assembly line” costing you your health?
It’s not just the colossal, headline-making screw-ups — you know, doing an organ transplant without checking to see if the organs match the patient’s blood type, like I wrote about in the Daily Dose for March 18th.
Many times, medical errors hit a lot closer to home — your local doctor’s office.
A recent study published in the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care examines errors that take place in the “primary care” setting. That’s a fancy way of saying “at the doctor’s office” as opposed to the ER or hospital. Since Americans visit their doctors’ offices more than 20 times as often as they go to the hospital, this study’s finding warrants some attention.
The research tracked and classified 344 errors committed in 42 clinics over just a four and a half month period in 2000 (seems like a lot, doesn’t it?). Of these mistakes, only (I use this word comparatively — even one error of this type is too many) about 13% were caused by shortcomings in the physician’s knowledge or skill level
But a truly astonishing 82% were caused by “system malfunctions” like office administrative mistakes and communication lapses, among other things.
Some of these mistakes carried some pretty severe consequences — including one patient’s death that was linked to a poorly relayed message. And this is just in a handful of clinics over only four and a half months! Imagine how frequently this kind of thing happens nationwide over the course of an average year. Remember, too, that the errors that make up this study are only those that were detected or admitted to. I wonder how many other blunders skated by “under the radar.”
There’s no easy solution to this problem. One possible way might be to reduce the size of medical practices’ administrative staff in order to limit the number of people who have the opportunity to mishandle an individual’s records. After all, these “assembly line” medical mistakes may echo the industrial model that’s been proven accurate time and again on factory floors everywhere: When you double the number of people involved in any process, you increase the chance of errors within that process FOUR-FOLD
Action to take: Unless you have the good luck to have a “family doctor” who has a small, intimate practice (and a good doc is hard to find), you’re just going to have to track your own care. Ask for your test results, call until you get them, and then be sure to ask what they mean. And don’t stop asking questions until you get answers that make sense.
Because the devil’s in the details,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
