Despite resistance from the medical establishment, he found systemic ways to reduce errors, paving the way for a global standard. Thousands of lives have been saved.
Lucian L. Leape, a surgeon whose insights into medical mistakes in the 1990s gave rise to the field of patient safety, rankling much of the health care establishment in the process, died on Monday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 94.
The cause was heart failure, his son James said.
Dr. Leape’s investigations into medical errors planted the seeds for patient safety programs that are in place today across the globe and that have saved thousands of lives.
He was chief of pediatric surgery at Tufts University in the 1980s when he noticed frequent mistakes leading to significant patient harm, even death.
In a bold move late in his career, Dr. Leape left his full-time surgical practice and began collaborating with colleagues at Harvard on a study that chronicled for the first time the number of injuries and deaths that resulted from medical error. Known as the Harvard Medical Practice Study, it examined a large population of injured patients in New York State.
That study led to a landmark report, “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” published in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine).
In the report, Dr. Leape and his co-authors estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 Americans died each year from medical errors, a majority of which arose from dysfunctional systems — not flawed individuals, as the medical profession and public had long believed.