We Need a Better System to Avoid Medical Mistakes

By Dena Rifkin, MD

I saw a patient in the hospital awhile ago with a disease you probably haven’t heard of—iatrogenesis imperfecta. ‘Iatrogenesis,’ in plain English, means that the illness was caused by medical intervention. Sometimes such complications of care are inevitable or idiosyncratic, like unexpected allergic reactions to medications. Sometimes they are preventable, or caused by human error. That is the ‘imperfecta’ part—no one is perfect, and we can make some very high-stake errors when we try to make people better.

In my patient’s case, he received a medication that was contraindicated given the multiple diseases he had. The situation was very complex—as it almost always is in the hospital these days—and no one anticipated the problems that might occur. The end result was a patient with organ failure who became one of the many people for whom modern medical care is fraught with error and complication. Read More