Respecting And Reflecting On Diagnostic Errors – Health Affairs Blog

".....The neglected importance of empowering patients. Even more important than supporting clinicians in diagnosis-related functions is recognizing and supporting patients in their role as co-producers of diagnosis. This largely unexplored aspect of diagnosis improvement represents another essential pillar in making diagnoses more timely, accurate, reliable, and efficient. Patients can make valuable contributions by seeking timely access for worrisome symptoms; providing accurate and thorough histories; sharing their hunches about possible exposures or etiologies; helping ensure that test results are reported back; following up with feedback about expected improvement; adhering to empirical treatment trials permitting accurate re-assessment of preliminary diagnoses; respecting limits on staff time and societal resources; and in some cases even getting involved with disease-specific or generic patient safety advocacy organizations.
In contemplating such patient contributions to timely and accurate diagnosis, it is important that we not shift our responsibilities onto sick patient. Instead we need to imagine and facilitate an enhanced role for patients to play. The key question is: what will it take at the provider and institutional level to empower patients to take on these roles and help them flourish in them?
The journey continues: the upcoming third annual conference on diagnostic errors. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait for the “high-profile errors” Wachter cites to kill more patients for diagnostic errors to get their due respect. Enough “low-profile” diagnostic delays, needless morbidity, inefficiencies, missed diagnoses, and even deaths are already happening every day. Hopefully the next highly profiled event will instead be the upcoming 3^rd Annual AHRQ-sponsored International Conference on Diagnosis Errors in Medicine next month in Toronto. Here we will again bring together engaged clinicians, researchers, academics, quality improvement and risk management professionals and patients—all dedicated to a common goal—to better understand and reduce medical errors and to reduce the harm from missed and delayed diagnoses....."