To achieve meaningful patient safety reform and reduce preventable "never events," the healthcare industry must reassess the way it measures medical mistakes to get a more accurate picture of the extent of the errors, according to a Harvard Business Review blog post.

Patient safety is an ongoing concern in hospitals and health systems, especially with the revelation that medical errors are the nation's third-leading cause of death. However, rates of never events have seen little apparent progress, due in large part to flawed measurement processes, wrote Timothy Morgenthaler, M.D., chief patient safety officer at the Mayo Clinic, and Charles M. Harper, M.D., the clinic's executive dean for practice.

Mayo has taken several steps to monitor patient safety in a way that sidesteps these flaws, according to the authors. For example, the clinic analyzes every step in the care process for patients who die under its care, even in cases when death was the expected outcome, creating quarterly metrics for recurring care issues or opportunities for improvement.

Medication errors or unintended drug side effects occurred in about half of all surgeries done at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) within an eight-month period, according to a study conducted at the world-renowned healthcare organization. While the research was conducted on procedures that took place at MGH, it indicates that similar failures happen at hospitals around the country.

Notably, one-third of the medical errors identified in the MGH study had a negative impact on patient care, while the remainder had the potential to cause an adverse event, concluded researchers in the hospital's anesthesiology department who observed 277 procedures there. Previous studies, in contrast, have found these types of errors to be incredibly rare.