Measuring Diagnostic Error: A Review of Patient Complaints

Patient cueing, a type of diagnostic error

Diagnostic failure can be due to a variety of psychological errors on the part of the diagnostician. An erroneous diagnosis rendered by previous clinicians can lead a diagnostician to the wrong diagnosis. This report is the case of a patient who misdiagnosed herself and then led an emergency room physician and subsequent treating physicians to the wrong diagnosis. This mechanism of diagnostic e...

Complaints and patient satisfaction: a comprehensive review of the literature

A Comprehensive Overview of Medical Error in Hospitals Using Incident-Reporting Systems, Patient Complaints and Chart Review of Inpatient Deaths

BACKGROUND Incident reporting systems (IRS) are used to identify medical errors in order to learn from mistakes and improve patient safety in hospitals. However, IRS contain only a small fraction of occurring incidents. A more comprehensive overview of medical error in hospitals may be obtained by combining information from multiple sources. The WHO has developed the International Classificatio...

A Scoping Review of Diagnostic Error: Executive Summary

Diagnostic error is difficult to define, because diagnosis is both a process and the outcome of that process. Furthermore, it is difficult to judge when the process is complete – a physician may have a working diagnosis that seems to be the most likely reason for a given set of symptoms, but often only time will tell if that diagnosis was correct or not. Was his or her original diagnosis wrong,...

The challenges in defining and measuring diagnostic error.

Diagnostic errors have emerged as a serious patient safety problem but they are hard to detect and complex to define. At the research summit of the 2013 Diagnostic Error in Medicine 6th International Conference, we convened a multidisciplinary expert panel to discuss challenges in defining and measuring diagnostic errors in real-world settings. In this paper, we synthesize these discussions and...