Milestones

Betsy Lehman, a 39-year-old journalist and mother of two who had been undergoing breast cancer treatment, dies from a massive chemotherapy overdose at a leading Boston hospital. It was several months before the hospital realized that her death was the result of an error. Learn more

The Institute of Medicine releases its seminal report To Err is Human, which estimates that medical error causes as many as 98,000 preventable deaths each year in U.S. hospitals alone. The report highlights Betsy’s story.

The Massachusetts legislature first establishes the Betsy Lehman Center to address the need for better coordination of efforts by health care providers and other state agencies to reduce medical error and keep patients safe.

The Center is reestablished under the cost, quality, and transparency provisions of health reform legislation known as Chapter 224, and relaunched as an affiliate of the state’s Center for Health Information and Analysis.

The Betsy Lehman Center works with multiple state agencies to research, map, and design a system called the Patient Safety Navigator that would help guide health care providers in Massachusetts on how to report key patient safety events.

The first issue of Patient Safety Beat is published. The Center's email newsletter provides important and lively stories about patient safety news and progress in Massachusetts.

Research is released on the state of patient safety in Massachusetts and cost of medical error — what has changed since Betsy’s death, current challenges, and what we can do to improve safety here.

The Massachusetts Healthcare Safety and Quality Consortium publishes the Roadmap to Healthcare Safety, a strategic plan that sets forth a vision to propel investment, action and transformative change on safety across the Commonwealth’s health care continuum.