Diagnostic testing audits are meaningful only to the extent that audits examine true clinical impact, because many diagnostic testing errors are ultimately detected and corrected, or discarded as meaningless.
45 A growing fraction of US healthcare organisations are using this instrument, but it was designed specifically to identify treatment errors, specifically errors of commission, and is poorly suited to detecting diagnostic errors, many of which are errors of omission.
21 As noted by Graber, many methods to study diagnostic errors have limited use in calculating the frequency of the problem.
Despite the fact that they account for about 15% of medical errors and are the leading cause of medical malpractice litigation (twice as many cases as medication errors), diagnostic errors receive little attention [cf. [ 31, 32].
While the literature has suggested many potentially fruitful interventions for reducing diagnostic errors, most have not been systematically evaluated and/or widely implemented in practice.
Although it is unknown how many patients will be harmed from diagnostic errors, our previous work 17 suggests that about one-half of diagnostic errors have the potential to lead to severe harm.
The use of clinical decision-support systems (DSS) has been one of many strategies proposed for the reduction of diagnostic errors in practice [ 13].
Many methods have been suggested to study diagnostic errors, including autopsies, case reviews, surveys, incident reporting, standardised patients, second reviews and malpractice claims.
11 22 23 Moreover, compared with the many different safety concerns encountered in practice, physicians perceive diagnostic errors to be more likely to cause serious harm or death compared with other safety concerns.
