A report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), released earlier this month, attracted national attention with the finding that 44,000 to 98,000 Americans are killed every year by medical mistakes.

But, among Harvard health care officials and staff at Harvard-affiliated hospitals, this news was hardly a shock.

Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management Donald M. Berwick was one of the 19 authors of the IOM study, which called for Congress to create a "national patient safety center" to deal with the problem.

And Berwick is not the first Harvard faculty member to study medical mistakes. Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers in 1995 found dangerous prescription errors at a Boston-area hospital, and helped design a computer system to alleviate the problem.

Finally, though University Health Services (UHS) says its patients do not usually require the kind of treatments in which errors are most common nationwide, officials say they've taken steps to ensure that medical mistakes are not a problem.

Survey Gains National Attention

Berwick is part of an IOM committee that periodically submits reports and recommendations on various health issues to Congress.

Researchers have long been aware of the magnitude of the problem presented by medical errors, he said, but the IOM study hurtled the issue into the public eye.