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Research has shown that interventions targeted to specific medical procedures can prevent specific types of medical errors or iatrogenic harms. What is not clear is whether initiatives to promote patient safety during the past decade have lowered the overall rate of medical errors in hospitals. To find out, researchers retrospectively reviewed 2400 hospitalizations at 10 randomly selected North Carolina hospitals from 2002 through 2007; the authors chose North Carolina because they consider its hospitals to be leaders in patient safety initiatives.
Using a standardized method for identifying potential medical harms, the researchers found 25 harms per 100 admissions — 63% of the harms were considered preventable. Among the most common harms w…