Patient Advocacy is increasingly being developed as a necessary response to our ailing health care system.  What is happening to our system?  The following research results will give some answers......

The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, released research findings on medical errors in their landmark study To Err Is Human in 1998.  They documented that there were at least 98,000 deaths per year due to medical errors.  This is the equivalent of a couple of airliners crashing each day.

In 2003, the Rand Institute, one of our nation's premier research institutions, released a study showing that, overall, adults received only approximately half of the recommended levels of care for any illness, acute or chronic.  Most of us take health care quality for granted," said lead study author Elizabeth A. McGlynn, Ph.D., Associate Director of  RAND Health. "This study shows that we can't. There is a tremendous gap between what we know works and what patients are actually getting. Virtually everyone in this country is at risk for poor care."

Dr. Barbara Starfield (Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health) published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2004 reporting that deaths due to medical error and negative drug effects totaled 225,000 per year.  She cautioned that these numbers were primarily hospital-based and did not reflect patients suffering non-fatal disability or poor treatment outcomes.

The fifth annual patient Safety in American Hospitals Study released in April, 2008, stated that from 2004-2006 patient safety errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of US Medicare patients in hospitals.  The cost to the Medicare program was $8.8 billion.

The World Health Organization (WHO) of the United Nations ranks the medical system in the US  in 37th place in the world!