In the Spotlight: Diagnostic Errors

Source: Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions -Media (3/11/2009)

Patient safety experts at Johns Hopkins are pushing for medical providers to give the same attention to diagnostic errors as they devote to drug prescription errors, wrong-site surgeries and hospital-acquired infections.

Drs. Newman-Toker and Pronovost, estimate that 40,000 to 80,000 hospital deaths per year are the result of errors in diagnosis (missed, wrong or delayed). Perhaps more frightening is the suggestion that such diagnostic errors could be “drastically reduced by simply adopting tools like a checklist to help physicians remember critical diagnoses or by readily available computer programs (which can be used on a mobile device) to calculate risk factors for certain conditions.”

Experience has demonstrated to us that even a slight delay in diagnosis, such as pulmonary embolism, brain aneurysm, or cancer can result in death. The wrong diagnosis or a missed diagnosis has the same potential for harm. We have sued hospitals which have few or no policies and procedures relative to issues such as infection or no mechanism of enforcing the policies which they do have.

The idea that a simple checklist might trigger a series of important studies or tests which could lead to the correct diagnosis sounds ridiculous, but it is accurate, even with advances in modern medicine.

posted by David Marc Schwadron, Esq.