Tackling Patient Safety, Diagnostic Errors on a System Level

Diagnostic errors, like delayed or missed diagnoses, pose a significant threat to patient safety. But the good news is, they are largely preventable, so long as the U.S. healthcare industry adopts a total system safety approach, according to Marcus Schabacker, M.D., Ph.D., president and CEO of patient safety nonprofit ECRI."In the United States, we lose about 45,000 to 100,000 patients every year due to preventable medical errors," Schabacker said in an interview, citing the seminal "To Err Is Human" report. "If you compare this proportionally to aviation, that would mean that in the United States, every single day, two airliners crash with a hundred percent fatalities. What do you think would happen if that actually happened for two days in a row? No airplane in the United States would take off anymore."