According to a new study by patient safety researchers, “medical errors” in hospitals and other healthcare facilities are becoming increasingly common.
New York residents sometimes perform online searches before choosing a physician, but the results provided by search engines like Google and Yahoo do not always tell the whole story. The medical community is rarely eager to share the details of malpractice lawsuits, and a desire to contain this kind of information leads to many such lawsuits being settled with the plaintiffs signing nondisclosure agreements.
A recent study out of the University of California San Francisco, published in the prestigious medical journal Pediatrics, finds that a drug commonly used to treat anemia may also be useful for treatment in babies that suffer from certain birth injuries. The study points to two specific benefits:
The third leading cause of death in the United States is stroke, killing more than 140,000 people each year. Approximately 795,000 people suffer a stroke each year. Of these, roughly 600,000 are first attacks, while about 185,000 are recurrent attacks.
In an effort to meet the goals outlined in the 2007 Prescription Drug User Fee Act, the Food and Drug Administration has released two guidance documents focused on reducing medication errors. According to the Institute of Medicine, around 7,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medication-related issues, so reducing them is a priority.
According to a recent study, in the United States, at least one in 20 adults, or 12 million people each year, may be misdiagnosed when they go to see their physicians. Researchers estimated that about 50% of these diagnosis errors have the potential to cause serious harm.
According to a new study published in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety, approximately 12 million adults in the United States who seek outpatient medical care are misdiagnosed every year. This amounts to 1 out of 20 patients and according to researchers, 50% of those misdiagnosis cases has the potential to cause severe harm.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), malpractice ranks number three among the leading causes of death in the United States, coming in behind cancer and heart disease. There is an average of one payout every 43 minutes.
New York patients might have prescription medications that have not been approved by the FDA to treat the condition they’ve been prescribed for. This is called off-label drug use, and though it is legal and somewhat common, patients could benefit from understanding how off-label drug use works and knowing which of their own medications may have been prescribed this way.
One in every seven Medicare patients in hospitals succumbs to a medical error. In 1999, it was reported that 98,000 patients in hospitals across the US were dying from a medical error! Today, decades later, in times where we have access to world class medical technology and expertise, the number of deaths each year from preventable errors in hospitals has sky-rocketed to a whopping 440,000!
