Posted on 07/20/2023 6:57:08 AM PDT by Red Badger
Researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions looked at 15 diseases and concluded that 371,000 Americans died and 424,000 were permanently disabled as a result of misdiagnoses.
About 795,000 Americans die or are permanently disabled every year due to misdiagnosed medical conditions.
A new analysis led by experts at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore looks more closely at diagnostic error and its impact.
"Prior work has generally focused on errors occurring in a specific clinical setting, such as primary care, the emergency department or hospital-based care," lead author Dr. David Newman-Toker, director of the Center for Diagnostic Excellence, said in a Hopkins news release.
"These studies could not address the total serious harms across multiple care settings, the previous estimates of which varied widely from 40,000 to 4 million per year. The methods used in our study are notable because they leverage disease-specific error and harm rates to estimate an overall total," he added.
The researchers, from Johns Hopkins and the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions, looked at 15 diseases and concluded that 371,000 Americans died and 424,000 were permanently disabled as a result of misdiagnoses.
About 75% of the serious harms happen in connection with vascular events, infections and cancers. In all, 15 diseases account for nearly 51% of the serious harms.
Five conditions -- stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, venous thromboembolism and lung cancer -- cause nearly 39% of total serious harms.
Across diseases, the overall average error rate was estimated at 11%, but the rate ranges widely -- from 1.5% for heart attack to 62% for spinal abscess. Stroke was the top cause of serious harm from misdiagnosis, found in 17.5% of cases.
Diseases with high error rates should be top priority targets for solutions, the authors said.
"A disease-focused approach to diagnostic error prevention and mitigation has the potential to significantly reduce these harms," Newman-Toker said. "Reducing diagnostic errors by 50% for stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, pulmonary embolism and lung cancer could cut permanent disabilities and deaths by 150,000 per year."
Johns Hopkins has already developed and started using solutions to address missed stroke cases, he said.
Solutions include virtual patient simulators to improve the skills of front-line clinicians, as well as portable eye movement recordings via video goggles and mobile phones to enable specialists to remotely assist clinicians in diagnosing stroke. They also include computer-based algorithms to automate parts of the diagnostic process and dashboards that measure performance and provide feedback on quality improvement.
"Funding for these efforts remains a barrier," Newman-Toker said. "Diagnostic errors are, by a wide margin, the most under-resourced public health crisis we face, yet research funding only recently reached the $20 million per year mark. If we are to achieve diagnostic excellence and the goal of zero preventable harm from diagnostic error, we must continue to invest in efforts to achieve success."
The study findings were published recently in BMJ Quality & Safety.
More information
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more on stroke diagnosis.
Copyright © 2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Every hospital will be KILLER KING HOSPITAL......Annnnd you won’t be able to sue for damages.....
I read a hilarious article yesterday about a couple of nurses who stayed in college long enough to get a PhD. in something. They then went back to being nurses and demanded that they be referred to as “doctor”. A couple of real Jill Bidens. Had “doctor” written all over everything. What a clown show.
I'm not skeptical at all. My wife was almost killed by a simple bladder infection and she was treated by an internal medical physician. He prescribed the wrong medicine and she wound up in ICU. If anything the number is too low.
I have a particular congenital condition (I'm 75, the "offense" occurred when I was 73 . . . time's almost up . . stat of lims) . . . and I have been advised as I described
Would you be willing to share more? Name of the med.
Fauci’s flu achieved this “goal” all by itself ... and we marked that by setting the little, evil b@stard up for life!
Of course not giving your care provider the whole truth messes up any diagnosis
I don’t remember but I did take it with me when visiting here in ICU. As it happened the University Medical Professor was going room to room with his students. I showed him the medication and his eyes widened. “Dr. X prescribed this for bladder infection”? I knew then something was amiss. My wifes pancreas shut down and didn’t produce insulin and subsequently her blood sugar went sky high. When went to the emergency room, the ER said her condition was deadly serious and asked if this had happened before. I said no. He diagnosed her with diabetic ketoacidosis.
Anyway she survived and later Dr. X said he didn’t know what happened. But I knew. We changed doctors. The latest one isn’t much better though.
Now do “properly prescribed medications.”
Now compare supplements.
Me neither. It is likely a magnitude of order higher.
Glad she made it. DKA is puzzling.
Was it new onset?
Yes. I thought that was supposed to for type 1 diabetes patients.
"The researchers, from Johns Hopkins and the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions, looked at 15 diseases
and concluded that 371,000 Americans died and 424,000 were permanently disabled as a result of misdiagnoses."
"About 75% of the serious harms happen in connection with vascular events, infections and cancers.
In all, 15 diseases account for nearly 51% of the serious harms."
"Five conditions -- stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, venous thromboembolism and lung cancer -- cause nearly 39% of total serious harms."
this hardly comes as a surprise to ANYONE dealing with a rare or unusual disorder.
Which, IMO, means they are probably undercounting it.
I had a MRSA infection in 2012 and the hospital seemed to be doing it’s level best to kill me off.
By the grace of God, they didn’t.
No wonder the fake scamdemic was embraced by the hospitals. they saw dollar signs and were used to killing people.
My mom had a doctor do something about the ulcer she had and she nearly died from what he did. She went back to the doctor as she explained that he knew what he did wrong so wasn’t likely to do so again.
My 34 year old nephew was killed by the deadly chinese virus vaccine in minnesota last year.
My aunt broke her hip and took a year to die from the infection that set in from the hospital.
My cousin died some years after getting a heart stent from a heart attack at 55 years old.
Practicing medicine...
A person who graduates last in medical school is called a doctor.
Doctors bury their mistakes.
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