Hospitals should make their safety records public.

In 2005, 57 people died in New Jersey hospitals as a result of preventable medical errors. Another 150 required surgery to deal with the consequences of an error and 77 did not need surgery but had their hospital stays lengthened.

A total of 400 "serious patient safety events" were reported in the first-ever annual report on preventable errors released in the fall of that year by the state Department of Health and Senior Services.

The New Jersey report came on the heels of an Institute of Medicine report that summer that revealed that medication mistakes harm more than 1.5 million Americans every year.

The 2006 IOM report came nearly seven years after its report, "To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System," which found that 98,000 Americans die each year from preventable medical errors.

New Jersey's hospitals can do better. In fact, there is a program already in place that will help them identify and improve the systems that currently lead to most preventable errors.

It was the initial IOM report that prompted business leaders to launch the "Leapfrog Group" as a way to promote medical-error prevention and save lives.

The New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, which I lead, is the state's designated Leapfrog leader.

The Leapfrog Group aims to use the leverage of its members - the corporations and public agencies that buy health benefits on behalf of millions of people - to initiate improvements in the safety, quality and affordability of health care.

It promotes four hospital quality and safety practices based on independent scientific evidence:

Computer physician order entry. (Notes about prescriptions and orders, currently scribbled by doctors on little pieces of paper, would be entered into a hand-held computer.)

Evidence-based hospital referral. (Some hospitals and doctors are better than others at certain procedures. So when it comes to nonemergency surgery, those with the best track records should be selected.)

Staffing of intensive-care units by physicians experienced in critical-care medicine. (Having an experienced physician on hand in these situations has been proven to save lives.)

Keeping the Leapfrog Safe Practices Score. (These practices, established by the National Quality Forum, amount to medical no-brainers. Leapfrog requires participating hospitals to publicly report their progress on meeting these standards.)