A patient who dies in a hospital has had a negative patient outcome. So has a patient who gets a rash. The phrase is built to cover both, and that is precisely what is wrong with it: a word that can mean death or a rash is a word that has stopped meaning anything.

William Lutz catalogued this one in Doublespeak alongside “therapeutic misadventure,” which is what a hospital calls it when the treatment was the thing that killed you. Both phrases share a grammar: no actor, no verb that anyone performed, just an outcome that occurred, the way weather occurs.

Mamet wrote that nothing good can come of language used inappropriately. The specific harm here is not that families are fooled; they rarely are. It is that the people who write these reports learn to think in these words, and a doctor who thinks in “outcomes” is one step further from the patient than a doctor who thinks in “died.”