Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 4,627

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Incidence of Adverse Events and Negligence in Hospitalized Patients: Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study I

Open access
Brennan, Troyen A., Leape, Lucian L., Laird, Nan M., Hebert, Liesi, Localio, A. Russell, Lawthers, Ann G., Newhouse, Joseph P., Weiler, Paul C., Hiatt, Howard H.·1991·New England Journal of Medicine
DOI 10.1056/nejm199102073240604
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

BACKGROUND: As part of an interdisciplinary study of medical injury and malpractice litigation, we estimated the incidence of adverse events, defined as injuries caused by medical management, and of the subgroup of such injuries that resulted from negligent or substandard care. METHODS: We reviewed 30,121 randomly selected records from 51 randomly selected acute care, nonpsychiatric hospitals in New York State in 1984. We then developed population estimates of injuries and computed rates according to the age and sex of the patients as well as the specialties of the physicians. RESULTS: Adverse events occurred in 3.7 percent of the hospitalizations (95 percent confidence interval, 3.2 to 4.2), and 27.6 percent of the adverse events were due to negligence (95 percent confidence interval, 22.5 to 32.6). Although 70.5 percent of the adverse events gave rise to disability lasting less than six months, 2.6 percent caused permanently disabling injuries and 13.6 percent led to death. The percentage of adverse events attributable to negligence increased in the categories of more severe injuries (Wald test chi 2 = 21.04, P less than 0.0001). Using weighted totals, we estimated that among the 2,671,863 patients discharged from New York hospitals in 1984 there were 98,609 adverse events and 27,179 adverse events involving negligence. Rates of adverse events rose with age (P less than 0.0001). The percentage of adverse events due to negligence was markedly higher among the elderly (P less than 0.01). There were significant differences in rates of adverse events among categories of clinical specialties (P less than 0.0001), but no differences in the percentage due to negligence. CONCLUSIONS: There is a substantial amount of injury to patients from medical management, and many injuries are the result of substandard care.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1056/nejm199102073240604

Cites

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

No references could be resolved yet.

Research works printed but not linked: 10

  1. Siegel, 1986, N Y State J Med, 86, 377
  2. 10.2307/1191413 · DOI
  3. Priest, 1987, Valparaiso Univ Law Rev, 22, 1
  4. Nader, 1987, Gonzaga Law Rev, 22, 15
  5. 10.1056/NEJM198103123041104 · DOI · Paper page
  6. 10.1056/NEJM198103123041103 · DOI
  7. 10.1097/00005650-198912000-00006 · DOI
  8. 10.7326/0003-4819-112-3-221 · DOI
  9. 10.1056/NEJM198908173210725 · DOI
  10. Albany, 1985, New York State Department of Health. Statewide planning and research cooperative system: annual report series

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Brennan, T. A., Leape, L. L., Laird, N. M., Hebert, L., Localio, A. R., Lawthers, A. G., Newhouse, J. P., Weiler, P. C., & Hiatt, H. H.
Venue
New England Journal of Medicine
Publisher
Massachusetts Medical Society
Published
1991-02-07
Volume
324
Issue
6
Pages
370-376
ISSN
  • 0028-4793 (ISSN-L)
  • 1533-4406
DOI
10.1056/nejm199102073240604
OpenAlex
W70273200
Cited by
4,627
References
0
FWCI
133.44
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.