According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), malpractice ranks number three among the leading causes of death in the United States, coming in behind cancer and heart disease. There is an average of one payout every 43 minutes.
According to a new study published in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety, approximately 12 million adults in the United States who seek outpatient medical care are misdiagnosed every year. This amounts to 1 out of 20 patients and according to researchers, 50% of those misdiagnosis cases has the potential to cause severe harm.
According to a recent study, in the United States, at least one in 20 adults, or 12 million people each year, may be misdiagnosed when they go to see their physicians. Researchers estimated that about 50% of these diagnosis errors have the potential to cause serious harm.
New York patients might have prescription medications that have not been approved by the FDA to treat the condition they’ve been prescribed for. This is called off-label drug use, and though it is legal and somewhat common, patients could benefit from understanding how off-label drug use works and knowing which of their own medications may have been prescribed this way.
One in every seven Medicare patients in hospitals succumbs to a medical error. In 1999, it was reported that 98,000 patients in hospitals across the US were dying from a medical error! Today, decades later, in times where we have access to world class medical technology and expertise, the number of deaths each year from preventable errors in hospitals has sky-rocketed to a whopping 440,000!
