Third annual patient safety in American hospitals study.(HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY)

"In response to the increased need for patient safety measurements, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) recently developed and released a set of patient safety indicators (PSIs). Using this same measurement tool, [we have identified] the rates of patient safety incidents and overall performance for every non-federal hospital in the United States to establish a best-practice benchmark against which other hospitals can be evaluated. [Among our findings:]

* Approximately 1.24 million total patient safety incidents occurred in almost 40 million hospitalizations in the Medicare population. These incidents were associated with $9.3 billion of excess cost …