This paper aims to provide hospital administrators and others making decisions about hospital error funding, as well as researchers, with information about what good hospital error research looks like. It offers a selective review of how the error literature has approached hospital error, which is used to develop five criteria for sound hospital error research. It also explores the potential for better hospital error research of quali-quantitative analysis (QQA), an innovative social sciences research method. In a context in which other methodologies all have their shortcomings, QQA appears to go some way toward meeting the five criteria for sound hospital error research. Ideally, QQA would be used in combination with other approaches to answer the kinds of questions that are important to hospital administrators when they are faced with high-stakes error evaluation situations.