Ignoring Patient Insight Tied to Diagnostic Error
Patients' views are not often included in records of diagnostic errors, but new data released on November 5 suggest that patient and family narratives may contain key information that should formally be included in the system. To learn more about how patient experience and patient-physician interactions might affect the risk for diagnostic error, Traber Davis Giardina, PhD, MSW, and colleagues analyzed reports submitted from January 2010 to February 2016 to the nonprofit Empowered Patient Coalition. The coalition began collecting family experiences to learn more about safety events from the patient's point of view. Patients, family members, and caregivers voluntarily submit data by responding to questions and adding their own text. Davis Giardina, from the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness, and Safety at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center and assistant professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and colleagues reported their results in an article published online in Health Affairs.
