Top hospitals by ICD-10 misadventure diagnosis

Medical errors are a serious problem in the healthcare industry, costing anywhere between $17 and $29 billion annually—even ranking as the third-highest cause of death, according to some estimates. Errors come in many forms, such as misdiagnosis, patient misidentification, and poor sterilization procedures. One classification of error, known as misadventure, has its own set of ICD-10 diagnosis codes. Misadventure is defined as harm from or adverse reactions to medical treatment. The codes, which range from Y62 to Y69, cover accidental cuts, foreign objects left in body, failures to sterilize, dosage errors, instrument failures, blood or drug contamination, and other causes. The following list identifies the top 25 hospitals with the highest estimated number of combined diagnoses of misadventures in 2016 (most recent data available).

The overall number of hospitals with diagnoses in any of the relevant ICD-10 codes was quite small, totaling slightly less than 175 according to Definitive Healthcare data. The facilities with the highest estimated diagnoses tended to be large hospitals with significant patient volumes, as would be expected when measuring the absolute number of diagnoses. They also had far more estimated inpatient surgeries than the national median of 914. Most of the ICD-10 codes deal with errors that are more likely to or can only occur during surgical procedures.