Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Misdiagnosis, don't document it, it never happened right?

Millions of people are subjected to hospital infections and dangerous procedures for conditions they don't even have. But always pay for.. sometimes with their lives.
If physicians' diagnostic accuracy were like air travel, one in 20 planes would not land when or where it should, and one in 40 flights would put passengers at risk of significant harm, or even crash.
 Diagnostic errors. In addition to the severe issues they cause patients, diagnostic errors are the most common....Frank Seidelmann, DO, co-founder, chairman and CMO of Radisphere, a national radiology practice, says diagnostic errors are largely an issue in radiology due to substandard operating models. "To date, there is still no established set of standard best practices that radiologists, patients, health systems and payers can use to gauge the quality of radiology services," Dr. Seidelmann says. "What is needed, at the very least, is a better clinical operating system that ensures routing of images to the right subspecialty and a consistent practice of blinded peer reviews. This will significantly increase quality of care, reduce costs and enable radiologists to practice at the top of their license."
Cheating on radiology exams: For years, doctors around the country taking an exam to become board certified in radiology have cheated by memorizing test questions, creating sophisticated banks of what are known as "recalls," a CNN investigation has found.

Those are estimations from an April 2014 report from Houston Veterans Affairs and Baylor College of Medicine researcher Hardeep Singh, MD, and colleagues who say that 12 million U.S. outpatient adults may be given incorrect or delayed diagnoses every year. Singh says reducing misdiagnosis must be a major quality focus for 2015 because providers and patients should not tolerate error rates this high.

This casts a huge problem for the integrity (admissibility in court) of operative records (legal business records), especially when harm or death is the outcome

1 comment:

  1. Beautifully written! Integrity is such a powerful word and yes, it takes effort every day to be a person of integrity BUT it is what is RIGHT!

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