Costs of medical injuries in Utah and Colorado

Patient injuries are thought to have a substantial financial impact on the health care system, but recent studies have been limited to estimating the costs of adverse drug events in reaching hospitals. This analysis estimated the costs of all types of patient injuries from a representative sample of hospitals in Utah and Colorado. We detected 459 adverse events (of which 2 65 were preventable) by reviewing the medical records of 14,732 randomly se lected 1992 discharges from 28 hospitals. The total costs (all results are discounted 1996 dollars) were $661,889,000 for adverse events, and $308,382 ,000 for preventable adverse events. Health care costs totaled $348,081,000 for all adverse events and $159,245,000 for the preventable adverse events . Fifty-seven percent of the adverse event health care costs, and 46% of th e preventable adverse event costs were attributed to outpatient medical car e. Surgical complications adverse drug events, and delayed or incorrect dia gnoses and therapies ware the most expensive types of adverse events. The c osts of adverse events were similar to the national costs of caring for peo ple with HIV/AIDS, and totaled 4.8% of per capita health care expenditures in these states.