IOM report could be another landmark for patient safety

Tuesday, the Institute of Medicine is coming out with what could be another seminal report in the history of patient safety.

“Diagnostic Error in Health Care” is the fourth in the Quality Chasm series, which also includes the now-famous “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System” (1999), “Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century” (2001) and the lesser-known but equally important “Preventing Medication Errors” (2007).

One person who is anxiously awaiting the new volume is Dr. Carol Gunn, an occupational-medicine physician and patient-safety advocate in Portland, Oregon. Gunn lost her sister Anna in 2014 after Anna’s cardiac symptoms were, as she put it, “repeatedly ignored” while physicians treated another condition.

Gunn, who is not involved in producing the IOM report, predicted that the assessment will show a much higher number of preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals than previously though because she expects the IOM to include errors related to “delays in diagnosis” in its new count.

“To Err is Human” famously placed the number of annual preventable hospital deaths at 44,000-98,000. A 2013 study from independent researcher John James of Patient Safety America raised the estimate to 210,000-400,000 by using different methodology.

Gunn joined MedCity News last week for a video interview about the forthcoming IOM report and the epidemic of medical errors in America that is showing few signs of abating. Here is an excerpt.