Patient safety experts say we need to pay more attention to the grave consequences of medical errors — because they are killing us, literally.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins released this week the results of a new study where they examined the medical death rate data over an eight-year period. What they found is that there are more than 250,000 deaths per year due to medical errors in the U.S.

That figure surpasses what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists as its third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.

The other two leading causes of death, the CDC reports, are heart disease and cancer. The two conditions claimed the lives of 611,105 and 584,881 in 2013, respectively.

Researchers say that the CDC fails to classify medical errors separately on death certificates, and that needs to change.

“Top-ranked causes of death as reported by the CDC inform our country’s research funding and public health priorities,” Martin Makary, professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform, said in a university press release. “Right now, cancer and heart disease get a ton of attention, but since medical errors don’t appear on the list, the problem doesn’t get the funding and attention it deserves.”

Most medical errors aren’t due to inherently bad doctors, the research team emphasizes. And they don’t believe that reporting any errors should be addressed by punishment or legal action. Rather, they say, most errors represent systemic problems, including poorly coordinated care, fragmented insurance networks, the absence or underuse of safety nets, and other protocols, in addition to unwarranted variation in physician practice patterns that lack accountability.

They suggest more research is needed to address the problem. Their analysis was published this week in the BMJ.