Toolkits

Assessment can identify the current state of a process or program to reveal areas of weakness and inform improvement implementation efforts. This scenario-based tool focuses on 10 areas of an organization’s journey to support diagnostic safety.

Patient and family engagement is core to effective and safe diagnosis. This new toolkit from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality promotes two strategies to promote meaningful engagement and communication with patients to improve diagnostic safety: (1) a patient note sheet to help patients share their story and symptoms and (2) orientation steps to support clinicians listening and “presence” during care encounters.

Safe diagnosis in medical offices is challenged by staff workload, communication, and poor information sharing. This Supplemental Item Set for the AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) Medical Office Survey (MOSOPS) examines elements contributing to time availability, testing and referrals, and provider and staff communication. The Diagnostic Safety Supplemental Item Set was released in time for the scheduled Fall 2021 MOSOPS data submission.

Time pressure can negatively impact critical thinking, information gathering, and communication abilities. This tool builds teamwork and decision-making skills by testing participants as they work through a time-delimited scenario with a sick child to gather clues and determine a diagnosis. 

Effective communication is an important component of diagnostic accuracy. Shaped with data collected by a patient safety organization, this five section toolkit features tactics to support effective communication across diagnostic process in children’s hospital care, including the use of time outs, case analysis and communication gap assessment.

This toolkit focuses on identification of, and rapid response to, sepsis in obstetric patients. It includes screening, evaluation and monitoring, and antibiotic use recommendations for maternal sepsis patient.

Proactive identification of conditions that degrade the diagnostic process can drive improvement. This toolkit provides resources to help organizations seeking to improve diagnosis. The publication includes case studies that illustrate implementation challenges and provides infrastructure enhancement suggestions for hospital teams as they design interventions to reduce diagnostic errors.

Diagnostic error prevention in primary care is a persistent challenge. This AHRQ-funded toolkit provides guidance for ambulatory care organizations that seek to improve the reliability of diagnosis in children. The material focuses on tactics to enhance how practices recognize, track, and follow up on adolescent depression, pediatric elevated blood pressure, and actionable laboratory results.

Patient engagement has been promoted as a strategy to enhance safety in health care. This toolkit helps patients organize information about their medical history, current concerns, symptoms, and medications to prepare them for medical appointments.

Inadequate follow-up of test results can contribute to missed and delayed diagnoses. Developing optimal test result management systems is essential for closing the loop so that results can be acted upon in a timely manner. The Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety convened a working group to identify how technology can be used to facilitate improved communication and timely action regarding test results. This report summarizes the methods used by the working group and their findings. Recommendations include improving communication by standardizing the format of test results, including required timing for diagnostic testing responses, automating the notification process in electronic health records, and optimizing alerts to reduce alert fatigue. A past WebM&M commentary discussed a case involving ambulatory test result management.

Clinical reasoning can be flawed due to bias, fatigue, or knowledge deficits. This tool provides a five-component mechanism to help instructors assess students' diagnostic reasoning abilities and guide feedback (i.e., hypothesis-directed data gathering, articulation of a problem representation, formulation of a prioritized differential diagnosis, diagnostic testing aligned with high-value care principles, and metacognition. Faculty development videos are also provided to guide in use of the tool.

Articles in this special issue cover diagnostic errors, including cognitive, system, and educational strategies to reduce them.

This toolkit includes resources to help clinicians and educators improve their understanding of cognitive errors and diagnostic reasoning.

This toolkit provides resources to help augment testing processes in ambulatory care settings, including tools for identifying areas of concern and measuring improvements.

This set of materials provides checklists, worksheets, and other aids to help implement a reliable critical test result communication program. A previous AHRQ WebM&M commentary addressed the issue of communication surrounding critical laboratory values.