Recently, patient safety collaborators from across the globe traveled to The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to take part in the inaugural Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality Observership. Participants arrived ready to take a deep dive with the Armstrong Institute into Johns Hopkins Medicine’s prioritized approach to patient safety. This pioneering three-day observership(...)
diagnostic errors
Why Public Reporting of Diagnostic Errors Might Come Sooner than You Think
Posted by | Measurement of Safety and Quality, Preventing Patient HarmOne night, a woman is examined in the emergency department complaining of vertigo. Her physician orders a CT scan, and when the tests come back negative, he diagnoses her with a benign inner ear condition and sends her home. He never sees her again. What he never learns is that her dizziness was far from(...)
Common Symptoms, Uncommon Causes: Reducing Misdiagnosis on the Front Lines
Posted by | Preventing Patient HarmIn 2013, a 52-year-old man went to an emergency department complaining of dizziness. Physicians evaluated him, decided that it was a benign condition — as it usually is — and sent him home. Days later, it became apparent that this was no harmless event. He suffered a significant stroke, with permanent disability as the result.(...)
How Teamwork Can Reduce Missed Diagnoses
Posted by | Organizational and Cultural Change, Preventing Patient HarmEvery American will experience a missed or delayed diagnosis at some point in his or her lifetime. Saying that is not a scare tactic — it's a reality, according to a 2015 National Academy of Medicine report titled "Improving Diagnosis in Health Care." Yet we have not made effective use of a simple solution: teamwork.(...)
Ruling out the wrong diagnosis
Posted by | Preventing Patient HarmAlthough misdiagnosis may kill up to 80,000 annually—more people each year than firearms and motor vehicle accidents combined—you won’t find it on the list of the country’s leading causes of death. Most Americans don’t realize how frequently well-meaning medical providers get it wrong. Just last year Johns Hopkins researchers found that one in 12 ICU patients(...)