Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

by Stanley McChrystal

In a now famous 1999 Institute of Medicine study, “To Err Is Human,” it was estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 people died every year as a result of medical errors. Even if the lower estimate of the study is used, deaths due to medical errors would have been the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s seventh-leading cause of death in 1998, meaning that more people died as a result of medical errors than from motor vehicle accidents (43,458 deaths), breast cancer (42,297 deaths), or AIDS (16,516 deaths).* A new study published in September 2013 asserts that the number of deaths due to medical error is dramatically higher: 210,000 to 400,000. Either estimate would have put medical errors as the third-leading cause of death in the CDC’s 2011 ranking. If the estimated 100,000 deaths due to hospital-acquired infections are included, this loss is equal to twenty Boeing 747 airliners going down every week.