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.

Defining what constitutes quality care—especially in a large, urban hospital—isn’t easy.
University of Cincinnati (UC) researchers, however, are addressing the nationwide problem with a unique system to reduce medical errors and improve patient care in local hospital emergency departments.

When medical residents work shorter hours, fewer patients are transferred to intensive care and there are not as many interventions by pharmacists to avoid errors in medication, according to a Yale School of Medicine study in Annals of Internal Medicine.

When it comes to disclosing medical errors to patients, there is a gap between physicians' attitudes and their real-world experiences admitting such errors, according to a University of Iowa study.

Patient safety incidents at the nation's hospitals rose three percent over the years 2003 to 2005, but the nation's top-performing hospitals had a 40 percent lower rate of medical errors when compared with the poorest-performing hospitals, according to the largest annual study of patient-safety issued today by HealthGrades, the leading independent healthcare ratings company.