Misdiagnosis of cardiovascular conditions can lead to serious patient harm. This systematic review found that misdiagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) occurs in approximately 1-2% of cases, and AMI is commonly diagnosed as other heart conditions, musculoskeletal pain, or gastrointestinal disease. The authors suggest that there are opportunities to reduce cases of missed AMI with better education about atypical symptoms and improved training of electrocardiogram interpretation.

Trauma patients, who often suffer multiple, severe injuries and who may arrive to the Emergency Department (ED) unconscious, are vulnerable to adverse events. Using data reported to the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting System (PA-PSRS), researchers in this study evaluated the safety challenges of caring for patients presenting to the ED after a motor vehicle collision. Common challenges included issues with monitoring, treatment, evaluation, and/or documentation, patient falls, medication errors, and problems with transfers.

Autopsies are an important tool for detecting misdiagnoses. Autopsies were performed on 32 septic individuals who died within 48 hours of admission to the intensive care unit. Of those, four patients were found to have class I missed major diagnosis. These results underscore the need to perform autopsies to improve diagnosis.

Reducing diagnostic error is essential to patient safety. This article describes the use of structured education sessions and deliberate practice with senior clinicians to improve diagnostic skills among medical residents. These sessions focused on generating differential diagnoses and identifying cognitive errors and knowledge gaps.

To reduce diagnostic errors, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) recommends increasing nursing engagement in the diagnostic process. This article reviews the current state of diagnostic education in nursing training and suggests inter-professional individual and team-based competencies to improve diagnostic safety.

Disruptive and rude behavior can hinder teamwork and diminish patient safety. This randomized, simulation-based study including attendings, fellows, and residents explored whether rudeness during handoff affects the likelihood for challenging a diagnostic error. The authors found that rudeness may disproportionally hinder diagnostic performance among less experienced physicians.

The hectic and complex environment of emergency care can reduce diagnostic safety. This article discusses clinical reasoning and decision-making strategies used by emergency medicine physicians, contributing factors to diagnostic errors occurring in emergency medicine (e.g., overconfidence, cognitive stress, anchoring bias), and strategies to reduce the risk of error. A previous WebM&M commentary discussed an incident involving diagnostic delay in the emergency department.

Efforts to reduce diagnostic error should include educational strategies for improving diagnosis. This article describes the development of a learning health system around diagnostic safety at one large, integrated health care system. The program identified missed opportunities in diagnosis based on clinician reports, patient complaints, and risk management, and used trained facilitators to provide feedback to clinicians about these missed opportunities as learning opportunities. Both facilitators and recipients found the program to be useful and believed it would improve future diagnostic safety. 

This article discusses cognitive decision processes and biases, and their consequences on clinical decision making by nurse practitioners. The authors present several clinical examples of diagnostic error and discuss strategies to avoid future errors.

This retrospective cohort study characterized diagnostic errors among adult patients readmitted to the hospital within 7 days of hospital discharge. Over a 12-month period, 5.6% of readmissions were found to contain at least one diagnostic error during the index admissions. These diagnostic errors were primarily related to clinician diagnostic reasoning, including failure to order needed tests, erroneous interpretation of tests, and failure to consider the correct diagnosis. The majority of the diagnostic errors resulted in some form of clinical impact, including short-term morbidity and readmissions.

This article describes the use of a case-based simulation to explore how physicians reason, create differential diagnoses, and ultimately achieve a correct diagnosis. Participating physicians who achieved the correct diagnosis (herpes zoster) utilized systems-based or anatomic approaches, rather than focuses on life-threatening diagnoses alone, and employed debiasing strategies.

As one strategy to improve diagnosis, this article describes the use of computerized case presentations and facilitated discussions (based on the National Academy of Medicine diagnostic process framework) for teaching diagnostic reasoning education to clerkship and preclinical medical students.  

This study involving a survey of incoming interns found that nearly all medical interns believe that inadequate physical examination can lead to adverse events and that 45% have witnessed an adverse event due to inadequate examination. The authors propose a five-pronged intervention for improving physical examination training.

Using the IOM definition of diagnostic error, this study interviewed hospitalized adults to characterize their experiences with diagnostic errors and their perspectives on causes, impacts and prevention strategies. Nearly 40% of patients interviewed reported at least one diagnostic error in the past 5 years that adversely impacted their emotional and physical well-being. Qualitative analysis revealed five main themes underlying the causes of diagnostic error: problems with clinical evaluation, limited time with clinicians, poor communication between clinicians and patients or between clinicians, and systems failures. Suggested strategies to reduce diagnostic error included improvements to clinical management, increase patient access to clinicians, communication improvements between patients and clinicians and between clinicians, and self-advocacy by patients.

Research has suggested that health care providers’ emotions may impact patient safety. These authors conducted 86 semi-structured interviews with emergency department (ED) nurses and physicians to better understand their emotional triggers, beliefs about emotional influences on patient safety, and emotional management strategies. Patients often triggered both positive and negative emotions; hospital- or systems-level factors primarily triggered negative emotions. Providers were aware that negative emotions can adversely impact clinical decision-making and place patients at risk; future research should explore whether emotional regulation strategies can mitigate these safety risks.

This retrospective cohort study used root cause analysis (RCA) to examine safety reports from emergency departments at Veterans Health Administration hospitals over a two-year period. Of the 144 cases identified, the majority involved delays in care (26%), elopements (15%), suicide attempts and deaths (10%), inappropriate discharges (10%) and errors following procedures (10%). RCA revealed that primary contributory factors leading to adverse events were knowledge/educational deficits (11%) and policies/procedures that were either inadequate (11%) or lacking standardization (10%).

Misdiagnosis of a neurologic emergency such as stroke can lead to serious morbidity or mortality. Using a large multi-state database, this study examined the likelihood of readmission or inpatient mortality among patients who were initially discharged with nonspecific diagnoses of headache or back pain and found that 0.5% of headache and 0.2% of back pain patients experienced an inpatient death or serious neurological event after ED discharge. Extrapolated to a national level, this translates to over 55,000 patients with adverse outcomes due to a missed diagnosis for headache or back pain.

Enhancing clinical reasoning skill, particularly among trainees, is emerging as a strategy to reduce diagnostic error. The authors of this commentary suggests that the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s (ACGME) consider revising their core competencies to include clinical reasoning to provide trainees with the tools necessary to monitor and prevent diagnostic errors.