Safer medicine

HIPPOCRATES’ ADMONITION to doctors to first do no harm is an admirable notion. But even the most talented doctors can make mistakes, sometimes with disastrous results. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences, released a blockbuster report documenting how basic medical errors were causing up to 98,000 deaths a year.

The fallout led doctors and hospitals -- which typically are loath to admit mistakes -- to immediately promise to improve patient safety. One of the largest of those efforts is “The 100,000 Lives Campaign,” a voluntary program run by a Boston-based nonprofit that signed up 60% of hospitals and is trying to get them to adhere to the most current scientific evidence in making decisions about patient care. The campaign’s overall goal is to reduce error-related deaths by a series of deadlines over the next several years.

The first deadline was last month, and the campaign released an initial, encouraging progress report. Since starting in 2004, up to 122,000 unnecessary deaths may have been prevented. Hospitals achieved that by focusing on six basic medical procedures, including deploying rapid-response teams at the first sign a patient’s health was seriously declining, standardizing heart attack treatments and preventing surgical site infections by giving patients antibiotics before operations.

This is good news for many reasons. For years the medical community has said that it was doing all it could to keep errors down, and it has fought against stricter standardization of medical practices.

But “The 100,000 Lives Campaign” starkly shows that medicine and patients can benefit by doctors adopting more uniform procedural and safety rules. The fact is there is so much research nowadays about which medical interventions work that physicians who depart from rule books should be the rare exception rather than the rule.