Most people wouldn’t have any difficulty recognizing heart disease and cancer as the top causes of death in the United States. However, most folks are shocked to learn that the No. 3 cause of death in America is medical mistakes.
In a famous paper published by the Institute of Medicine in 1999 titled “To Err Is Human,” it was estimated that 98,000 people per year died due to medical errors. The concluding recommendation was that we should work more on making safer systems and less on individual blame.
