A new analysis from Frost & Sullivan takes a closer look at 30 adverse patient safety events in healthcare and how much they are costing the system.
In 2016, such occurrences cost the U.S. and European healthcare systems $317.93 billion, according to the report. By 2022, Frost & Sullivan estimates that amount will rise to $383.7 billion.
What exactly are these events?
According to a PowerPoint presentation regarding the study, the six biggest adverse patient safety events are as follows:
- Medication safety
- Antibiotic resistance
- Patient diagnostics safety
- Sepsis
- Cybersecurity of medical device and patient data privacy
- Unnecessary emergency department admissions
These areas are ripe for innovative solutions and present opportunities for future investments, the presentation points out.
But it’s not only these topics that are impacting patients and health systems. Frost & Sullivan’s analysis outlines numerous other adverse events, including hand hygiene non-compliance, alarm fatigue, healthcare-associated infections, wrong-site and wrong-patient surgery and pressure ulcers.
Together, the 30 events analyzed in the study impact approximately 91.8 million patient admissions in America and Western Europe, and result in about 1.95 million deaths, according to Frost & Sullivan.
If certain solutions are applied, many of these events are preventable.
“Up to 17 percent of all hospitalizations are affected by one or more adverse events and around 15 percent of hospital expenditure is attributable to addressing them,” Anuj Agarwal, a transformational healthcare senior research analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said in a statement. “The fact that 30 to 70 percent of these are potentially avoidable makes it imperative to prevent them from happening.”
The analysis also takes a stab at predicting which trends and tools will drive development in the field.
For one, the shift to value-based care will prompt growth in the patient safety market. Integration of med-tech and digital health technologies will assist with safety options, and the use of predictive analytics can bring greater outcomes improvement. Finally, technologies like blockchain, AI and wearables can help limit safety violations.
Photo: Hero Images, Getty Images
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