Infants and young children treated with heart drugs get the wrong dose or end up on the wrong end of medication errors more often than older children, according to research led by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center published July 6 in Pediatrics.

The 4,000 "avoidable" errors last year, according to figures obtained by the Daily Mirror, "included surgeons operating on the wrong person or part of the body, doctors making wrong diagnoses and the prescription of dangerous doses of medication."

US has highest rates among 8 nations of patient-reported medical errors, wasteful or poorly coordinated care and high out-of-pocket costs; Dutch often fare best in affordable, accessible care, low rates of medical errors

The New York Times reports on a recently announced change in Medicare’s policy that is likely to have far-reaching implications for practice of medical malpractice law. The largest insurer in the US will no longer pay bills resulting from what it deems “preventable” medical errors made by hospital employees on patients under their care.

Mistakes should be considered shared commodities and used for all they're worth, researcher says

In the first study of its kind, researchers led by The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Ross Koppel, Ph.D. studied how hospital nurses actually use bar-coded technology that matches the right patient with the right dose of the right medication.

How frequently do doctors misdiagnose patients? While research has demonstrated that the great majority of medical diagnoses are correct, the answer is probably higher than patients expect and certainly higher than doctors realize.

Patient safety incidents cost the federal Medicare program $8.8 billion and resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths during 2004 through 2006, according to HealthGrades' fifth annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study.

surgeon accidently kills a patient, undoes the error and starts over again. Can mathematics make such science fiction a reality?

Surgical confusions—for instance, operations involving the wrong site, the wrong patient or the wrong procedure—occur infrequently in eye surgery procedures, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

When it comes to lab tests, interpreting the clinical importance of an out-of-range result depends on how much experience a physician has, suggests research from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. Investigators are presenting their findings at the American Academy of Pediatrics Conference Oct. 26 through Oct. 30 in San Francisco.

Clinical information technology systems – especially those known in the health care industry as computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems – promise to improve health outcomes, reduce medical errors and increase cost efficiency, but hospitals adopting them must plan for “immense” workflow issues and a host of other unanticipated consequences that come with them or face potentially crippling problems, concluded a study led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University.