FROM THE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Today at least 100,000 Americans every year die because of medical errors and mistakes, despite the best efforts of the good doctors, nurses and hospitals in this country. The system they work in is broken. Everybody knows a story about a friend or relative who went into the hospital and had something go wrong. We can and must change that. We’ve tinkered long enough with our health care system – a band-aid here, a cosmetic fix there. Mistakes and errors don’t just cost money, they cost lives.

I spent considerable time working to reform the health care delivery system in Pittsburgh, where I saw firsthand that it is possible to make systematic and far-reaching improvements in health care quality and safety. Every American deserves this kind of high-quality, error free health care.

We know from other high risk industries, such as aviation, that a fundamental requirement for improvement is that it must be safe to learn from errors. Punishment, ridicule and legal exposure drive error reporting underground so corrective action does not occur. Properly constructed health care quality and safety initiatives should be protected from liability. They are not now.

Along with Secretary Thompson, our leader on national health care policy, I applaud the sponsors of the Patient Safety Improvement Act for tearing down the barriers to quality improvement so that we can move toward the goal of error-free health care for every American.