Signature Assignment: Outcomes and Quality

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of bacteria (Arias & Murray, 2009). Chapter 17 in this text addresses the role of drug companies in creating this overuse crisis.

Misuse caught the public’s attention with the publication of the first IOM report on patient safety (Kohn et al., 2000), which examined the high rate of medical errors in hospitals, noting, as pointed out earlier, that thousands of patients die every year from preventable adverse events and another million are injured. Chassin’s (1997) definition of misuse focuses on errors related to the delivery of medical care, rather than the mis-application of medical care without untoward consequences.

One recent estimate suggested that at least 250,000 people die each year from medical errors in hospital settings; in 2016, medical errors were the third leading cause of death in the U.S. (Makary & Daniel, 2016). The cost of medical errors for 2008 was estimated to be $17.1 billion(Van Den Bos et al., 2011).