As part of its ongoing “Care Quality Initiative,” the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has issued a new report, this time focusing on diagnostic errors. The report, “Improving Diagnosis in Health Care,” follows “Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century” in 2001, and “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System” in 1999.
IOM studies have historically received close scrutiny by national policymakers and it is expected that the organization’s latest installment will do the same.
Addressing what the IOM calls a “blind spot” in the health care system -- diagnostic errors – the report says that some 12 million diagnostic errors occur each year, or one in 20 outpatient visits. At that rate, according to the report, almost all Americans will experience a misdiagnosis at some point in their lives.
Not surprisingly, the IOM report ties the incidence of medical professional liability lawsuits to the high number of misdiagnoses. As concluded by one of the report’s authors, Mark Graber, president of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine, wrong diagnoses are the leading cause of malpractice suits and are almost twice more likely to end in a patient’s death than claims for other types of medical errors.
But if past reports can help predict the reception of the IOM’s new study, the nation’s litigation environment will also be included as the report is debated.
“It is critical to look at this issue in a broad context rather than considering it in a vacuum,” said P. Divya Parikh, vice president of Research and Risk Management at PIAA, the nation’s leading organization representing medical professional liability protection providers. “Addressing diagnostic errors should be done with the goal of optimizing health care, which requires both improving patient outcomes and reforming our broken medical litigation system.”
More information on the report is available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/21794/improving-diagnosis-in-health-care. A video on the report is also available at https://youtube.com/fRdd3vFr79Y.