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Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine, an integrated global health enterprise in the United States, have said medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer.

According to a study published on Tuesday in The BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal, the researchers estimate that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors.

Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that heart disease and cancer each took about 600,000 lives in 2014; while respiratory disease, the next leading cause of death, caused about 150,000 deaths in the same year.
 
The authors of the study, led by Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Martin Makary, urged the CDC to immediately add medical errors to its annual report on the top causes of deaths. The authors say the coding system used by CDC to record death certificate data does not capture issues such as communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors and poor judgment that cost lives.

The CDC's published statistics count only the "underlying cause of death," defined as the condition that led a person to seek treatment. Therefore, if a doctor lists medical errors on a death certificate, they are not included in the final statistics. It is the underlying condition, such as heart disease or cancer that is mentioned.

The report says medical mistakes that can lead to death range from surgical complications that go unrecognised to errors in the doses or types of medications patients receive.

According to the authors, "While no method of investigating and documenting preventable harm is perfect, some form of data collection of death due to medical error is needed to address the problem."