The bill, which targets health care purchased through Medicare and Medicaid, is based on a report last November from the Institute of Medicine, which found up to 98,000 patients die every year because of medical error. The goal of the S.A.F.E. Act is to reduce the error rate by 50 percent over the next five years. It should also stress prevention of errors. We expect people to eat well, exercise and do all the right things to stay healthy.
Most people are patients at one point or another in their lives.
We need to make certain they are patients in the safest possible setting. Health care effects all of us from young to old and this legislation takes us in the right direction for safe and reliable services. The bottom line is that we have got to do better, and this legislation will take the first step in improving this bleak situation. The goal is to reduce medical error by 50 percent over the next five years. The bill also would establish a Center for Patient Safety to conduct research and dispense grants related to medical error reduction and it would afford providers with peer review confidentiality protections to cover the new error reduction reports.