(Some aspects of our care, like certain cancer treatments, are better, while others, like medical error rates, are worse).
There's disagreement in the medical literature about whether a so-called July Effect, where medical error rates increase in the summer, actually exists.
Many health care experts said they believed that the shift toward publicizing medical error rates and encouraging accountable care seemed to be paying dividends — and that providers were making changes in anticipation of the health care overhaul, which further emphasize accountable care.
Previous studies have demonstrated that sleep deprivation due to long working hours increases medical error rates among residents [ 1], and this finding was part of the impetus to enact ≤80-h/week work limits in the US [ 2].
A systemic-level approach rather than a within-subjects analysis was used in comparing interns' serious medical error rates, making these analyses comparable with analyses of errors system wide (i.e. those that involved both interns and other personnel), where a within-subjects design was not appropriate.
These systems have been widely diffused in the medical domain, not only for the reduction in costs of information and communication technology, but also for supporting physicians tasks in three directions: 1) reducing medical error rates [ 2, 3]; 2) supporting decision making activities [ 2, 4]; and 3) incrementing cost-benefit ratio and improving the quality of health services [ 2, 5, 6].
Specifically, each one year increase in age was associated with a 2% reduction in the likelihood of listing one or more possible cause of medical error (Incident Rate Ratio of 0.98: CI 0.97 to 0.99; p < 0.001).
When taking into account medical wards, error rates were significantly lower in haematology and medical oncology (p = 0.001, Table 3).
Twenty-four of 47 patients that sustained unexpected death died due to medical error, giving a rate of preventable death of 51%.
For each selected patient with unexpected death, charts were examined for medical errors and rated on a 1 to 5 preventability scale (from very unlikely to very likely) for the preventability of the death.
