The study identifies common diagnostic errors and suggests how identifying them can aid in better medical diagnosis.
Diagnostic errors are the most prevalent sort of medical error reported by patients and the most common cause of malpractice lawsuits.
Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital gathered and evaluated data from a variety of sources between 2004 and 2016, looking for patterns of diagnostic errors.
A total of 836 diagnostic errors were discovered in data collected from 4,352 patient safety incident reports, 403 closed primary care diagnostic error malpractice claims, 24 ambulatory morbidity and mortality rounds, and 355 focus group responses, allowing the researchers to characterize patterns of what went wrong.
The findings were then utilized to generate a list of disease-specific diagnostic problems as well as a taxonomy of the generic categories of primary care errors.
«Progress in understanding and eliminating diagnostic errors has been minimal,» said Gordon D. Schiff, MD, of the Brigham’s Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice.
«Clinicians could benefit from knowledge of both disease-specific and generic cross-cutting problems.» «Our findings can inform educational and quality improvement activities in order to foresee and prevent future errors,» says the researcher.
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