Opinion: Reducing preventable harm in hospitals

Each year, in the United States, millions of patients are harmed while receiving care in hospitals. They get infections, experience adverse reactions to drugs, develop dangerous bed sores, or come down with pneumonia from the very ventilators meant to help them breathe. The estimates of the number of people who die each year as a result of hospital errors have ranged from as many as 98,000 in a landmark Institute of Medicine report from 1999 to as many as 440,000 in a 2013 study. It's believed that most of these deaths could be prevented if health care providers always adhered to evidence-informed practices.