Diagnostic errors should be the next major target of patient-safety efforts and research, a pair of Johns Hopkins experts urge.
“Moving away from a model that chastises individual physicians to one that focuses on improving the medical system as a whole could offer big payoffs for improving diagnostic accuracy as well as the cost-effectiveness of care,” recommends David E. Newman-Toker, MD, PhD, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University's medical school and school of public health in Baltimore.
Dr. Newman-Toker and co-author Peter J. Provonost, MD, PhD, medical director of the John Hopkins' Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care, suggest errors could be reduced substantially with better use of checklists and algorithms and wider availability of computerized “diagnostic decision-support systems” (JAMA. 2009;301:1060-1062) (extract only; subscription required).
Between 40,000 and 80,000 U.S. hospital deaths result from misdiagnoses every year, the authors report, noting that malpractice suits based on diagnostic errors are nearly twice as common as claims for medication errors and result in the largest payouts.