Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Contact, publication, and social network information about Harvard faculty and fellows.

Medical Errors

"Medical Errors" is a descriptor in the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Descriptors are arranged in a hierarchical structure, which enables searching at various levels of specificity.

Errors or mistakes committed by health professionals which result in harm to the patient. They include errors in diagnosis (DIAGNOSTIC ERRORS), errors in the administration of drugs and other medications (MEDICATION ERRORS), errors in the performance of surgical procedures, in the use of other types of therapy, in the use of equipment, and in the interpretation of laboratory findings. Medical errors are differentiated from MALPRACTICE in that the former are regarded as honest mistakes or accidents while the latter is the result of negligence, reprehensible ignorance, or criminal intent.


This graph shows the total number of publications written about "Medical Errors" by people in Harvard Catalyst Profiles by year, and whether "Medical Errors" was a major or minor topic of these publication.
Bar chart showing 776 publications over 28 distinct years, with a maximum of 51 publications in 2005 and 2011
To see the data from this visualization as text, click here.
Funded by the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences through its Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program, grant number UL1TR002541.