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Medical Errors in U.S. Hospitals - a study by Health Grades Inc.

On July 27, 2004, the study by Health Grades Inc., a health-care consulting firm in Colorado that rates hospitals, estimated that medical errors in U.S. hospitals contributed to almost 600,000 patient deaths over the past three years, double the number of deaths from a study published in 2000 by the Institute of Medicine. Health Grades said an average of 195,000 patients a year died from preventable hospital errors, the equivalent of more than 530 people a day. The majority of patients who died in the Health Grades study were extracted from medical coding called "failure to rescue," which refers to errors in diagnosing or treating illness that occurs after an operation, such as pneumonia. If hospital errors were counted by the Centers for Disease Control as a cause of death, they would rank sixth, ahead of diabetes, influenza and pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, the study said.