MONDAY, April 2, 2007 (HealthDay News) -- Patient safety incidents in U.S. hospitals increased to 3 percent overall from 2003 to 2005, and the error gap between the nation's best- and worst-performing hospitals remained wide, a report released Monday found.
America's top rated centers had 40 percent lower rates of medical errors than the poorest-performing hospitals, the study showed.
The fourth annual HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study, put out by HealthGrades, an independent health care ratings company, examined over 40 million Medicare hospitalization records at almost 5,000 hospitals from 2003 to 2005.
The study found that:
"The cost of medical errors at American hospitals in both mortality and dollar terms continues to be significant, and the 'chasm in quality' between the nation's top and bottom hospitals, which HealthGrades has documented in this and other studies, remains," the study's primary author, Dr. Samantha Collier, HealthGrades' chief medical officer, said in a prepared statement.
"But the nation's best-performing hospitals are providing benchmarks for the hospital industry, exercising a vigilance that resulted in far fewer in-hospital incidents among the Medicare patients studied," Collier said.
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The American Academy of Family Physicians offers advice on what patients can do to help prevent medical errors.