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New Law Will Require Hospital Errors To Be Reported

The August 2, 2002 issue of the Baltimore Sun reports that the Maryland Office of Health Care Quality is working on writing regulations that would require hospitals to report all medical errors that cause patients serious harm. They hope to have them in place early in 2003.

In all cases where mistakes cause death or serious injury, or require corrective treatment, hospitals would have to determine what went wrong in the case and provide a plan to prevent similar mistakes from occurring in the future.

The new rules would also require hospitals to inform patient’s families about medication and surgical errors that result in a negative outcome.

According to Carol Benner, Director of the Office of Health Care Quality, “This will encourage hospitals to rally take a look at their systems, at problems that cause these errors. It’s what other states are doing. It is the right thing.”

To date, approximately 15 other states have passed mandatory reporting rules.

In 1999, the National Academy of Science’s Institute on Medicine released a report urging mandatory reporting of serious medical errors to the appropriate state agencies.

Their recommendations came in response to what they termed a “national epidemic” of medical errors that kill 98,000 hospital patients every year.

Predictably, hospitals are concerned that disclosing medical errors in such a public forum will expose them to liability and unwanted media attention.

Beverly Miller, vice president of the Maryland Hospital Association, said her group wants to keep the reports confidential. Stating that she favors the release of “non-identifiable information” that doesn’t identify specific cases, Miller echoes many hospital administrator’s concerns about opening themselves up to legal liability and unwanted media attention.

Commentary: Many times medicine deals with a crisis situation, whether it involves a patient’s health or their own institutional health, by simply masking the symptoms rather than fixing the cause. In this case, public disclosure of “non-identifiable information” rather than specific details is simply an attempt to cover up the symptoms. To be blunt, the liability and unwanted media attention hospitals are worried about are exactly what will fix the problem and improve patient safety as quickly as possible. We can’t think of any better motivators.

98,000 patient deaths every year demand it.

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