Liability and Regulatory Models for Managing “Never Events”

di Nicolas Terry -
AbstrAct: “Preventable adverse events” are now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.1. Almost twenty years after the publication of To Err Is Human2, structural problems combined with patient and provider heterogeneity conspire to make solutions to the medical error epidemic difficult to formulate. Particularly shocking are the numbers of adverse events caused by almost 500,000 health care–associated infections (HAIs) per year, at an annual cost of $9.8 billion3. Not all HAIs are preventable, but some are. Those HAIs fit the definition of “never events,” that the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality4 defines as “adverse events that are unambiguous (clearly identifiable ...