Are medical errors really the third leading cause of death in this country?

Background: I will be starting my residency in July, and I have to admit I find this fact to be a bit disturbing. I've heard before, based on a 1999 study, that medical errors were responsible for 100k deaths per year in the US. A new study is now claiming that number is closer to 250k, and that it's the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.

What says the OT? I'm interested to hear opinions from healthcare providers and also from people who feel that they have been impacted by preventable medical errors. I have a close family member who works in medical malpractice so I hear about this topic often, and as a student myself I have seen medical errors that led to worse outcomes for patients (although none that led to a patient's demise).

If you listen to the interview in the link below, Makary says that the aviation industry has a great system in place for analyzing errors and finding solutions. It's true, in any professional field we should try to learn from our mistakes. It would be great to see medical errors discussed more openly, but fear of litigation, I think, discourages this. Admitting one's faults is difficult (and I think that's human nature), but it's especially difficult when it affects people's health. During my last two years of clinicals, I can only remember a few times where specific medical errors were discussed openly and critically, with the insistence being that we could have, and should have, done better.

From the Washington Post:

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Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the research, said in an interview that the category includes everything from bad doctors to more systemic issues such as communication breakdowns when patients are handed off from one department to another.

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quote:

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Makary’s research involves a more comprehensive analysis of four large studies, including ones by the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of the Inspector General and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that took place between 2000 to 2008. His calculation of 251,000 deaths equates to nearly 700 deaths a day — about 9.5 percent of all deaths annually in the United States.

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Explanation from the NYT article:

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Using studies published since 1999, the researchers calculated a mean rate of death from medical error. Then they applied this rate to the yearly number of hospital admissions. In this way, they estimated that an average of 251,454 deaths per year in the United States are caused by medical error. The study is in BMJ.

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British Medical Journal article, including interview with lead author of the study Interestingly, he says the 250K estimate a very conservative estimate.

NYT Health Blog
USA Today
Washington Post