Tracking Progress in Improving Diagnosis: A Framework for Defining Undesirable Diagnostic Events

Diagnostic error is a prevalent, harmful, and costly phenomenon. Multiple national health care and governmental organizations have recently identified the need to improve diagnostic safety as a high priority. A major barrier, however, is the lack of standardized, reliable methods for measuring diagn...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of general internal medicine : JGIM Vol. 33; no. 7; pp. 1187 - 1191
Main Authors Olson, Andrew P. J., Graber, Mark L., Singh, Hardeep
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer US 01.07.2018
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Critical Care - methods
Critical Care - standards
Diagnostic Errors - prevention & control
Diagnostic systems
Health
Health care
Humans
Internal Medicine
Measurement methods
Medical diagnosis
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Organizations
Patient Safety - standards
Perspective
Researchers
Safety
diagnosis
diagnostic error
patient safety
measurement
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Summary:Diagnostic error is a prevalent, harmful, and costly phenomenon. Multiple national health care and governmental organizations have recently identified the need to improve diagnostic safety as a high priority. A major barrier, however, is the lack of standardized, reliable methods for measuring diagnostic safety. Given the absence of reliable and valid measures for diagnostic errors, we need methods to help establish some type of baseline diagnostic performance across health systems, as well as to enable researchers and health systems to determine the impact of interventions for improving the diagnostic process. Multiple approaches have been suggested but none widely adopted. We propose a new framework for identifying “undesirable diagnostic events” (UDEs) that health systems, professional organizations, and researchers could further define and develop to enable standardized measurement and reporting related to diagnostic safety. We propose an outline for UDEs that identifies both conditions prone to diagnostic error and the contexts of care in which these errors are likely to occur. Refinement and adoption of this framework across health systems can facilitate standardized measurement and reporting of diagnostic safety.
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ISSN:0884-8734
1525-1497
1525-1497
DOI:10.1007/s11606-018-4304-2