Emergency room crowding is a persistent factor that degrades safety for patients of all ages. This collection provides background, best practices, and recommendations to reduce emergency department crowding and its negative impact on pediatric care. The publications examine factors that influence crowding and improvement at the input, departmental, and hospital/outpatient stages of emergency care.

A missed or delayed diagnosis of stroke places patients at risk of permanent disability or death. This article describes how interdisciplinary teams used a failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) to create an acute stroke diagnostic process map, identify failures, and highlight existing safeguards. The FMECA process identified several steps in the diagnostic process as the most critical failures to address, including failure to screen patients for stroke soon after presentation to the Emergency Department (ED), failure to obtain an accurate history, and failure to consider a stroke diagnosis during triage.

Medical errors should be examined in the context of system failure to generate lasting opportunities for learning and improvement. This commentary discusses the AHRQ 2022 report entitled Diagnostic Errors in the Emergency Department: a Systematic Review and suggests a focus on care delivery processes over individuals, definitions, error rate review, and system design as noteworthy approaches to error reduction.

Electronic differential diagnostic support (EDS) are decision aids that suggest one or more differential diagnoses based on clinical data entered by the clinician. The generated list may prompt the clinician to consider additional diagnoses. This study simulated the use of one EDS, Isabel, in the emergency department to identify barriers and supports to its effectiveness. Four themes emerged. Notably, some physicians thought the EDS-generated differentials could reduce bias while others suggested it could introduce bias.

The reduction of cognitive bias is generating increased interest as a diagnostic error reduction strategy. This statement introduces the concept of cognitive bias and discusses methods to manage the presence of bias in obstetrics such as debiasing training and teamwork.

Missed diagnosis of stroke in emergency medicine settings is an important patient safety problem. In this study, researchers interviewed emergency medicine physicians about their perspectives on diagnostic neurology and use of clinical decision support (CDS) tools. Themes emerged related to challenges in diagnosis, neurological complaints, and challenges in diagnostic decision-making in emergency medicine, more generally. Participating physicians were enthusiastic about the possibility of involving CDS tools to improve diagnosis for non-specific neurological complaints.

Clinical decision support (CDS) systems are designed to improve diagnosis. Researchers surveyed emergency department physicians about their evaluation of human factors-based CDS systems to improve diagnosis of pulmonary embolism. Although perceived usability was high, use of the CDS tool in the real clinical environment was low; the authors identified several barriers to use, including lack of workflow integration.

A broad differential diagnosis can limit missed diagnostic opportunities. This article outlines how diagnostic timeouts, which are intended reduce bias during the identification of differential diagnoses, can improve diagnosis and reduce errors.

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 describes the development and implementation of a digital tool to centralize and standardize COVID-19-related resources for use in the emergency department (ED). Clinician feedback suggests confirms that the tool has affected their management of COVID-19 patients. The tool was found to be easily adaptable to accommodate rapidly evolving guidance and enable organizational capacity for improvisation and resiliency.  

Clinicians commonly face uncertainty in complex care situations. The authors propose several strategies for physicians, physician groups, departments, and professional societies to integrate uncertainty into emergency medicine decision-making.

Using data from a large commercial insurance claims database, this cohort study sought to identify factors associated with potentially missed appendicitis by comparing patients with a potentially missed diagnosis versus patients diagnosed with appendicitis on the same day in the emergency department. The researchers estimated the frequency of missed appendicitis was 6% among adults and 4.4% among children. Patients presenting with abdominal pain and constipation were more likely to have a missed diagnosis of appendicitis than patients presenting with isolated abdominal pain or abdominal pain with nausea and/or vomiting. Stratified analyses based on undifferentiated symptoms found that women and patients with comorbidities were more likely to have missed appendicitis.

This simulation study assessed whether integrating human factors engineering into a clinical decision support system can improve the diagnosis of pulmonary embolism (PE) in the ED. Authors found that this approach can improve the PE diagnostic process by saving time, reducing perceived workload and improving physician satisfaction with the technology.

Reporting on how test inaccuracies can lead to misdiagnosis of food allergies in children and the potential consequences, this magazine article describes a diagnostic tool to detect allergies and a desensitization process to reduce incidence of allergies in children.

This study assessed an error of omission—failure to assess children for occult fractures—in several clinically indicated situations, and found that such errors occur in about half of cases. Interventions to prompt specific actions, like checklists, may be useful in this clinical arena.