Improve Patient Safety By Reducing Diagnostic Errors

Newswise — Minimizing diagnostic error in medicine is an essential component of safe patient care, a theme to be explored by the physicians, medical scientists, safety officers, risk managers, and educators who will convene at the 2nd Annual Diagnostic Error in Medicine Conference, to be held at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel on October 21-22 in Los Angeles. The conference reviews current research in diagnostic error, emerging ideas on reducing error, and considers how to teach clinical reasoning.

The meeting is co-hosted by Stony Brook University Medical Center, Stony Brook, N.Y., and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. It is also sponsored by the Society for Medical Decision Making and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

“The healthcare community is just starting to address the problem of diagnostic error, despite the enormous harm these mistakes can cause,” says Mark L. Graber, M.D., Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Medicine, Stony Brook University Medical Center, and Chief, Medical Service, Northport VA Medical Center, and chair of the conference. Dr. Graber has researched diagnostic error in medicine and related issues for the past 10 years. He started Patient Safety Awareness Week in 2002 and chaired the first national conference on diagnostic error in 2008.

“There is a job for everyone in reducing diagnostic error – physicians, who should lead the charge, the healthcare system, and patients – and each group needs to understand key steps they can take to reduce error,” he adds.

Physicians, Dr. Graber explains, should recognize their propensity to err, understand the causes of diagnostic error, work with the healthcare system to fix as many flaws as possible, and encourage second opinions from colleagues or specialists. Healthcare organizations need to make sure expertise is available when needed for all cases, optimize coordination of care, and facilitate reliable communication. Patients can take a more active role in safety by simply being a good historian of their symptoms and speaking up when it comes to communication with their physicians.

The conference will reinforce these concepts through lectures and educational sessions with the following topics: Approaches of leading healthcare organizations to reduce diagnostic error; overview of research to reduce diagnostic error; understanding the root causes of diagnostic error; diagnostic error in emergency and critical care medicine, in primary and ambulatory care, and in perceptual fields (radiology); and developing a national consensus curriculum for clinical reasoning and error-preventive strategies.

Featured speakers include: Jerome P. Kassirer, M.D., Distinguished Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine, and former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, who will discuss “Clinical Reasoning – Lessons for the 21st Century”; Pat Croskerry, M.D., Ph.D., of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada, who will detail “Lessons from the Dual Process Model of Reasoning,” and Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Ph.D., Chief Research Scientist at The Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, who will present “Fast and Frugal Decisions – Can they be Improved?”

For more information about the conference, contact Grace Garey at [email protected], or visit the conference website at http://www.smdm.org/diagnostic_errors_overview.shtml.