Health Affairs December 2, 2019
The highly publicized crashes of two Boeing 737 Max aircraft quickly triggered pointed questions about the company’s commitment to safety versus profits. As we near the twentieth anniversary of the landmark Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on medical error, To Err is Human, that same level of scrutiny should apply to hospitals.
The IOM report, emerging just after Thanksgiving in 1999, put patient safety on the policy map with its startling estimate that up to 98,000 Americans die each year due to medical care in hospitals and up to another one million are injured. Despite then-President Bill Clinton’s quick endorsement of the call to cut preventable deaths in half within five years, however, a major study in 2010 found...