Statement of the problem (What healthcare issues are you addressing in your research proposal).

Please write a 3-4-page (Page cover and reference are not included) introduction to your research proposal. In this section you will include the following information:

· Statement of the problem (What healthcare issues are you addressing in your research proposal)

· Significance of the topic and and explanation of why this should be studied (supported with evidence and statistics)

· Target population (who are you studying)
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Introduction The emergency department (ED) is a critical, fast-paced environment that is susceptible to medical errors. Medical errors are defined as a “preventable adverse event or near miss due to the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended or use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim” (Pham et al., 2012, p. 448). They are the cause of 98,000 annual deaths in the United States. Per the Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable adverse drug events (ADE) were one of the most prevalent sources of avoidable medical errors with an annual occurrence of 1.5 million events. ADEs are also one of the most expensive errors, costing approximately $3.5 billion each year in the United States in 2006 (Pham et al., 2012). Adverse events were found to take place in 5 to 10% of health incidents with half of the incidents being avoidable (Watters & Truskett, 2013). Among these medical errors are diagnostic errors (incorrect diagnosis or failure to diagnose), which are the leading sources of error in emergency departments (Brown, McCarthy, Kelen & Levy, 2010). Some examples include the medication administration errors, false positive lab test results, unnecessary costs, tests and treatments (Schuur, Hsia, Burstin, Schull, & Pines, 2013). Per a national database of physician malpractice insurers, the payout for diagnostic errors was more than $347 million, which accounted for 46% of emergency department malpractice claims (Brown, McCarthy, Kelen & Levy, 2010). Diagnostic errors alone account for nearly 40,000-80,000 annual deaths in the United States (Pham et al., 2012). Factors in the ED such as psychological stress, fatigue, time pressure, distractions, overwhelming workloads, lack of immediate and complete patient health information can increase the rate of diagnostic errors (Mirvis, 2015). Overcrowding can cause errors such as erroneous documentation and malfunctioning administrative processes in emergency care (Ben-Assuli & Leshno, 2013). Another factor is…