When 18-month-old Kaelyn Sosa suffered a bump on the head in a fall at home, her mother took her to the emergency room to make sure it wasn't serious. While Kaelyn was under sedation in an MRI machine, her breathing tube was dislodged, cutting off her oxygen and causing a crippling brain injury.

As often happens after medical accidents, the facility, Baptist Children's Hospital in Miami, settled with the Sosa family for an undisclosed sum. But the hospital went further. Administrators analyzed the chain of events that led to the tragedy. They put in place new measures aimed at preventing the mistakes that injured Kaelyn from recurring and to better respond when something does go wrong. The hospital then engaged the child's parents in educational efforts to underline to medical staff the critical importance of patient safety.

Now Sandy Sosa, Kaelyn's mother, serves as a community liaison on the hospital's quality-and-patient-safety committee. "We wanted something good to come out of what happened to our daughter," she says.

Medical errors kill as many as 98,000 Americans each year, according to the Institute of Medicine, a government advisory group. In an effort to improve this record, some hospitals like Baptist Children's are taking steps to admit grievous mistakes and to learn from them in order to overhaul flawed procedures. That represents a sharp departure from hospitals' traditional response when something goes terribly wrong—retreating behind a wall of silence to guard against potential lawsuits.

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