Mandatory Medical Errors Reporting System Essay

One of the recommendations for healthcare organizations to employ in an effort to reduce the number of errors is to advocate for voluntary error reporting nationally while conducting research and developing tools for patient safety. This way, information about errors can be gathered and prevented from reoccurring at health care sites and by health care providers. Voluntary error reporting will act as a warning of potential or actual errors and suggest ways to avoid them in the future.

In the United States alone there are 98,000 deaths per year caused by low quality health care (Ignatavicius & Workman, 2013, pg. 2). This statistic is disturbing because the errors that resulted in death were errors that were preventable. The intent of this chapter is to bring awareness to health care providers that are able to make a change in the quality of health care. In current practice patients are subjected to medication errors, preventable hospitalizations, premature death, and poor care provided due to racial, ethical, or low-income factors.

Healthcare workers are not the only ones fearful of exposing medical errors. The medical institutes themselves operate behind a wall of silence. The IOM first recommended a national medical error reporting system in 1999 and despite attempts by then President Clinton, the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association successfully lobbied against it (Dyess, 2009). As of 2009, only 20 states have a mandatory medical error reporting system and only a fraction of estimated

In healthcare systems, there is a concept of fair and just culture. That concept is important to manage the risk. In any organization, errors can happen. But, the best first tool to understand the error is to report it when it happens. Reporting error in healthcare contributes to minimize the risk of recurring.

It is shocking to know that every year 98000 patients die from medical errors that can be prevented(Kohn, L. T., Corrigan, J. M., & Donaldson, M. S. (Eds.), 2000). Medical errors are not a new issue in our healthcare system; these have been around for a long time. Hospitals have been trying to improve quality care and patients safety by implementing different strategies to prevent and reduce medical errors for past thirty years. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in America (Allen, 2013). In addition medical errors are costing our healthcare system an estimated $735 billion to $980 billion (Andel, Davidow, Hollander, & Moreno, 2012).

Keeping patients safe is essential in today’s health care system, but patient safety events that violate that safety are increasing each year. It was only recently, that the focus on patient safety was reinforced by a report prepared by Institute of medicine (IOM) entitled ” To err is human, building a safer health system”(Wakefield & Iliffe,2002).This report found that approx-imately 44,000 to 98,000 deaths occur each year due to medical errors and that the majority was preventable. Deaths due to medical errors exceed deaths due to many other causes such as like HIV infections, breast cancer and even traffic accidents (Wakefield & Iliffe, 2002). After this IOM reports, President Clinton established quality interagency

When it comes to health care in the United States, the initial thought many people have are the many growing controversies concerning Obamacare, vaccinations, and making sure all Americans have access to affordable and quality health care. However, what many people fail to realize is a certain aspect in the medical community that, since the early 80’s with the infamous study by Berkman and Frankel, is increasing at such a tremendous rate that the Columbia Medical Review has referred to it as an “epidemic in the medical community.” The statistics regarding the number of individuals who die each year due to medical errors is rising; slowly becoming a major concern in the field. Doctors are busy individuals and at the end of the day still

Errors occur in health care as well as every other very complex system that involves human beings. The message in “To Err is Human”, by Archie Cochrane, was that preventing death and injury from medical errors requires dramatic, system wide changes. Health care professionals have customarily viewed errors as a sign of an individual’s incompetence or recklessness. As a result, rather than learning from such events and using information to improve safety and prevent new events, health care professionals have had difficulty admitting or even discussing adverse events often because they fear professional censure, administrative blame, lawsuits, or personal feelings of shame.

In 2000, the government released a report, via the AHRQ task force, called Doing What Counts for Patient Safety: Federal Actions to Reduce Medical Errors and Their Impact. This report was released

Medical errors are avoidable mistakes in the health care. These errors can take place in any type of health care institution. Medical errors can happen during medical tests and diagnosis, administration of medications, during surgery, and even lab reports, such as the mixing of two patients’ blood samples. These errors are usually caused by the lack of communication between doctors, nurses and other staff. A medical error could cause a severe consequence to the patient in cases consisting of severe injuries or cause/effect any health conditions, and even death. According to recent studies medical errors are not the third leading cause of death in the United States. (Walerius. 2016)

Medical error reports can vary by type of error, for example, rule violations, non-standardized medical practices, medication and diagnostic testing errors, management practices, patient misconduct, and insurance fraud. Research suggests that many medical errors go unreported and that nurses are pivotal in understanding barriers to reporting and ways to improve the reporting process. Nurses are believed to a critical part of the medical error reporting issue because they are the individuals that work hands on with patients (the most), have a duty and responsibility for patient advocacy, and changes, resulting from error reporting, that improve direct patient care practices impact nurse’s day to day actives (Wolf & Hughes, 2008). Evidence suggests

The Affordable Care Act has garnered much of the attention with its health care cost savings, but another objective is to improve on patient safety. There are countless deaths and injuries as a result from medical errors. Many experts conclude that the most significant way to minimize medical mistakes is to collect and examine information about past errors with an eye toward improving future care. The medical malpractice tort system has been a huge roadblock. The risk of getting sued is believed to prevent the kind of openness required to detect and study from mistakes when they happen.

Wrong site, wrong procedure, and wrong patient errors are avoidable safety issues. Nearly 1.9 trillion dollars are spent on medical errors each year in the United States (Catalano & Fickenscher, 2008). Between 1995 and 2007, 691 wrong-site surgeries have been reported to The Joint Commission's Sentinel Event data repository (AHC Media LLC, 2008). In 2003 in response to the outcry for better patient safety The Joint Commission

Robert E Hoyt identifies the importance of patient safety and health information technology in today healthcare industry. Technology today, partakes great potential in reduce medical errors, and preventable adverse events. Hoyt mention that, not all safety risks or events are related to errors and not all errors create safety issues (Hoyt, 2014). Not all errors that happen is preventable, and it is hard to determine if it is preventable or non-preventable safety risked and events. There are many agencies that support the patient safety concerns. The department of health and human services, is the prime leadership in improving the safety of the patients. The health technology has the potential to decrease medical errors, for example, improving and identified physician’s handwriting, less drug errors that has similar drug names, easier to integrate with other IT systems and easier to identify prescribers. Therefore, the concerns and concepts that hospitals and providers ought to focus on to continue to provide patient safety, exist in maintaining physician credential updated, by doing so, this support the quality of care. Whereas, updating credential, subside hospitals from being vigilant for physicians not meeting the credentials for their scope of practice. In addition to, physicians tighten the processes for distributing patient care, is another concern that reflects improvement, for example, physicians writing orders that are unreadable or miss

Reporting errors can strengthen the processes of care and also enhance the quality of care. To effectively avoid further errors that can cause harm to patients, improvements must be made on the incidents or events reported in reporting system. Reporting errors can help the organizations better understand what happened, identify the factors that cause the occurrence of errors or incidents, determine its frequency and predict whether it could happen again and find an intervention to prevent or to