Dr. Sharps is correct in asserting that more needs to be done, but not as he suggests by further limiting the legal rights of injured patients. Instead, our officials and lawmakers should focus on fully addressing the shortcomings of the insurance and health-care industries.

We must not ignore, as did Dr. Sharps, the underlying epidemic of medical errors that still plagues our nation’s hospitals and has resisted resolution for almost a decade since the Institute of Medicine confirmed that up to 98,000 deaths occur annually due to preventable errors.

Mr. Rendell’s efforts have disclosed that, in addition to the grief and suffering caused by mistakes, these errors and the resulting hospital readmissions cost Pennsylvanians almost $1 billion annually; that poor management of those requiring chronic care adds another $1.7 billion; and that hospital-acquired infections, which could be prevented by doctors and nurses simply washing their hands, increase costs by another $3.5 billion.

Over the past year, both Medicare and the Leapfrog Group, a coalition of private industry health-care payers, have taken the unprecedented step of refusing to pay for additional health-care costs stemming from medical mistakes and hospital-acquired infections. The National Quality Forum has identified more than two dozen types of “never events” — medical no-brainers that should never occur in a health-care setting. Those “never events” include wrong-site surgery, which the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority has documented as occurring virtually every other day in our commonwealth’s operating rooms.

While hospital patients are subject to at least one drug error a day, according to a July 2006 report by the Institute of Medicine, hospitals continue to lag in establishing computerized systems that make sure patients get the right medicines and correct dosages.

The Patient Safety Authority’s annual report for 2006 documented more than 6,400 serious events resulting in unnecessary and preventable deaths or serious injuries in our state’s hospitals. During the same year, injured patients or their survivors filed only 1,700 medical negligence lawsuits in Pennsylvania.

Finally, although the total amount of money paid to injured patients has been cut in half in recent years, the dramatic decrease in claims has not been reflected in doctors’ insurance rates.

The conclusion that must be drawn from these facts is that we need to reduce and eliminate those actions and errors that are injuring patients and driving health-care costs skyward. Here are some suggestions:

• Require hospitals to install modern information technology to track patient care and medications.
  
• Require hospitals to prominently display infection rates for post-operative, intensive care and the facility in general, along with a comparison to regional and statewide figures.
  
• Require hospitals to develop and implement infection-reduction strategies.
  
• Require Pennsylvania to follow the lead of a large and growing number of states to post the malpractice records of doctors and hospitals online with meaningful summaries of what occurred, so that patients and families can make informed choices about their health-care providers.

In addition, insurance companies must be better regulated for benefit of both the victims and the medical profession. The state should require any rate increase above the cost of living to be justified. Insurance carriers should also be mandated to disclose all administrative costs and cash reserves, and to distinguish between reserves for potential future losses and actual payouts, which are often far less.

Dr. Sharps and others who propose limitations on the legal rights of injured patients know that those measures do nothing to reduce the actual amount of medical negligence. Rather, the schemes they put forth only seek to minimize the impact of legitimate lawsuits on those responsible for the errors. As such, they have misdiagnosed the problem and prescribed the wrong medicine. Patient safety reform and insurance reform, not closing the courthouse to injured patients and their families, is the needed tonic.