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Hospitals strive to reduce deaths due to doctor, staff mistakes

Infection prevention nurses Kanae Gilliland, left, and Velda Kilgore, center, work with clinical administrator Ted Nelson to review charts and check for patients with catheters at Erlanger Hospital on Friday, June 24, 2016, in Chattanooga, Tenn. The trio are a team responsible for ensuring that catheters are properly placed to reduce the chance of infection.
Infection prevention nurses Kanae Gilliland, left, and Velda Kilgore, center, work with clinical administrator Ted Nelson to review charts and check for patients with catheters at Erlanger Hospital on Friday, June 24, 2016, in Chattanooga, Tenn. The trio are a team responsible for ensuring that catheters are properly placed to reduce the chance of infection. Infection prevention nurses Kanae Gilliland, left, and Velda Kilgore, center, work with clinical administrator Ted Nelson to review charts and check for patients with catheters at Erlanger Hospital on Friday, June 24, 2016, in Chattanooga, Tenn. The trio are a team responsible for ensuring that catheters are properly placed to reduce the chance of infection.

By Steve Johnson 7 min read

Dr. Joe Cofer is angry.

As Erlanger hospital’s chief quality officer, Cofer is responsible for ensuring the care patients get is as good as possible, and he is not happy about a recent report that suggests he – and his counterparts at hospitals across the U.S. – are not doing a good job.

A team of patient safety experts led by Dr. Martin Makary at Johns Hopkins University Hospital made headlines last month when it published a study concluding that medical errors were the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., behind heart disease and cancer but ahead of everything else.

Makary’s study singled out several areas for concern, including a lack of standard procedures for treatment, poor coordination by hospital staff, and fragmented insurance networks.

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Read Dr. Martin Makary’s letter to the Centers for Disease Control about medical error deaths at www.documentcloud.org/documents/2822345-Hopkins-CDC-letter.html