News Release

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) members Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., Doctor Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and the committee's chairman James Jeffords, R-Vt. introduced legislation today designed to prevent the loss of as many as 100,000 lives each year due to medical errors.

The bill is called The Patient Safety and Errors Reduction Act. Enzi said enactment of this bill should be a top healthcare policy priority.

As many as 100,000 Americans die each year as a result of mistakes made while receiving medical care, according to a study done by the Institute of Medicine. This is more than the death toll for breast cancer, AIDS and car accidents combined. Even if you aren't one of these unfortunate patients or a member of their families, the errors still dig into your pocketbook in the form of higher overall medical costs, legal fees and taxes to the tune of between $40-$50 billion per year.

"This is more than a set of startling statistics. The physical as well as emotional human toll is beyond numbers. The really sad thing is that most of this suffering could be prevented. That's why we are advocating the establishment of a Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety," said Enzi.

The center would be the collection point for a national patient safety database that will provide researchers information that will enable them to understand the nature and frequency of the errors in order that they may develop methods of preventing them. Following development of these models a voluntary system of their use for doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmacies and other healthcare providers and facilities, will be implemented. Enzi said the legislation would allow local communities to continue as healthcare administrators while using the new center for patients' safety to help them locally implement new protocols to reduce the occurrence of medical errors.

The bill authorizes $50 million for fiscal year 2001 for the project.

Enzi said privacy is stressed in the bill.

"We did not want to impose a one-size-fits-all, mandatory system on the already regulatory overburdened health care field so the program will be voluntary and only data that doesn't reveal the identity of patients will go into the database," he said. "Healthcare providers and facilities will not be exposed to any breach of confidentiality or new liability for having turned in evidence of errors."

The Institute of Medicine's Nov. 1999 report attributed the medical errors to a wide variety of causes. These include poorly designed patient charts, lack of communication between medical departments and staff, poor physician penmanship, confusion by patients and doctors with taking and prescribing prescription drugs, general human error, negligence and other causes.

The bill was developed by HELP Committee members after a series of hearings held this year on the incidence of medical errors in the nation's healthcare system. It has the support of a wide variety of health care professionals and associations.

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