Cognitive causes of suboptimal diagnosis made by physicians and consequences for the patient (WC2006-048)
Background
Starting date: 01/01/2007Diagnostic error in medicine is an important topic in the field of patient safety. In the international literature, it is estimated that diagnostic errors occur in 5-15% of the patients admitted to the hospital. Diagnostic errors are more often considered to be preventable and are more severe than other error types. Furthermore, it turns out that out of all medical error types, patients are the most worried about getting misdiagnosed, since being misdiagnosed often means receiving an incorrect treatment on top of missing out on the correct treatment. In order to be able to reduce the number of diagnostic errors in medicine, studying the causes is a prerequisite. Existing studies have shown that the causes of diagnostic errors are mostly cognitive, however system related causes also play a role.
Although the research in the field of patient safety has increased substantially over the last decade, research on diagnostic error received comparatively little attention, while both the high preventability and the severity of the consequences indicate that diagnostic errors are a particularly important error type to study and to develop interventions against.