Medical errors now represent the third leading cause of death in the U.S. and account for more than 250,000 deaths in the country each year — or 9.5 percent of all deaths — a new study has shown. Johns Hopkins researchers, who conducted the study, advocate for the CDC to update the criteria on their coding system for classifying deaths.

The researchers, led by Dr. Martin Makary, professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform, examined four separate studies that analyzed medical death rate data from 2000 to 2008 and then used hospital admission rates from 2013 to determine hospitalization rate to death rate.

Based on a total of 35,416,020 patients in a hospital, 251,454 deaths stemmed from medical errors such as medical mistakes, fragmented insurance networks, absence or underuse of safety nets, and other protocols.
“Unfortunately, this news is not surprising at all,” Dr. Lewis Levy, chief medical officer at Best Doctors, Inc. told HCB News. “While concrete efforts have been made to correct wrong site surgeries and other well-publicized issues from the past, not enough has been done to address medical error that results from an incomplete or inaccurate diagnosis.”

In 1949, the U.S. adopted an international form that used International Classification of Diseases (ICD) billing codes to tally causes of death, but at that time, it was under-recognized that diagnostic errors could result in death, said Dr. Makary in a statement.

The team said that since 1949, national mortality statistics have been made using billing codes which do not have a way to recognize mortality due to medical care gone wrong.

However, Bob Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch for the CDC, said that the coding is not the problem, according to NPR. He said that complications from medical care are listed on death certificates and the codes do capture that information.

The CDC’s mortality rates count only the "underlying cause of death," which is defined as the condition that led a person to seek treatment, according to NPR, and as a result, even if a doctor does list medical errors on a death certificate, they aren’t included in the published totals. Anderson said that the CDC’s guidelines are consistent with international guidelines and it would be difficult to change unless absolutely necessary.

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