Improving Diagnosis in Health Care

Improving Diagnosis in Health Care

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2015-12-29

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 0309377722

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Getting the right diagnosis is a key aspect of health care - it provides an explanation of a patient's health problem and informs subsequent health care decisions. The diagnostic process is a complex, collaborative activity that involves clinical reasoning and information gathering to determine a patient's health problem. According to Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, diagnostic errors-inaccurate or delayed diagnoses-persist throughout all settings of care and continue to harm an unacceptable number of patients. It is likely that most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, sometimes with devastating consequences. Diagnostic errors may cause harm to patients by preventing or delaying appropriate treatment, providing unnecessary or harmful treatment, or resulting in psychological or financial repercussions. The committee concluded that improving the diagnostic process is not only possible, but also represents a moral, professional, and public health imperative. Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, a continuation of the landmark Institute of Medicine reports To Err Is Human (2000) and Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001), finds that diagnosis-and, in particular, the occurrence of diagnostic errorsâ€"has been largely unappreciated in efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care. Without a dedicated focus on improving diagnosis, diagnostic errors will likely worsen as the delivery of health care and the diagnostic process continue to increase in complexity. Just as the diagnostic process is a collaborative activity, improving diagnosis will require collaboration and a widespread commitment to change among health care professionals, health care organizations, patients and their families, researchers, and policy makers. The recommendations of Improving Diagnosis in Health Care contribute to the growing momentum for change in this crucial area of health care quality and safety.


The Diagnosis

The Diagnosis

Author: Alan Lightman

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2001-03-13

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 037542119X

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From the bestselling author of Einstein’s Dreams comes this harrowing tale of one man's struggle to cope in a wired world, even as his own biological wiring short-circuits. As Boston’s Red Line shuttles Bill Chalmers to work one summer morning, something extraordinary happens. Suddenly, he can't remember which stop is his, where he works, or even who he is. The only thing he can remember is his corporate motto: the maximum information in the minimum time. Bill’s memory returns, but a strange numbness afflicts him. As he attempts to find a diagnosis for his deteriorating illness, he descends into a nightmarish tangle of inconclusive results, his company’s manic frenzy, and his family’s disbelief. Ultimately, Bill discovers that he is fighting not just for his body but also for his soul.


The Final Diagnosis

The Final Diagnosis

Author: Arthur Hailey

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2015-10-20

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 150402222X

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The #1 New York Times–bestselling author’s classic novel of life and death drama inside a major American hospital—“easy to read and hard to stop reading” (Kirkus Reviews). Change is in the air when a new board chairman sets out to modernize and expand Three Counties Hospital in Burlington, Pennsylvania—a once venerable institution whose standards have slipped. Dynamic Dr. Kent O’Donnell, a Harvard Medical School–trained surgeon, accepts the board’s offer to lead and reform the rundown, disorganized hospital because he wants to make his mark on the world. As medical-board president, O’Donnell faces his greatest challenge in Dr. Joe Pearson, Three Counties’ elderly head pathologist. Once an excellent diagnostician, Pearson is now out of touch with the latest research and procedures in laboratory medicine. But if the hospital lets the imperious doctor go, it risks losing an important benefactor’s financial support. Arthur Hailey’s fascinating, dramatic, and scrupulously researched story reveals both the professional, personal, and romantic aspects of an administrator-surgeon’s life, as well as the tragedies and moments of joy that occur every day in a hospital—a place where life often begins and ends.


Overdiagnosed

Overdiagnosed

Author: H. Gilbert Welch

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2011-01-18

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0807022012

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An exposé on Big Pharma and the American healthcare system’s zeal for excessive medical testing, from a nationally recognized expert More screening doesn’t lead to better health—but can turn healthy people into patients. Going against the conventional wisdom reinforced by the medical establishment and Big Pharma that more screening is the best preventative medicine, Dr. Gilbert Welch builds a compelling counterargument that what we need are fewer, not more, diagnoses. Documenting the excesses of American medical practice that labels far too many of us as sick, Welch examines the social, ethical, and economic ramifications of a health-care system that unnecessarily diagnoses and treats patients, most of whom will not benefit from treatment, might be harmed by it, and would arguably be better off without screening. Drawing on 25 years of medical practice and research on the effects of medical testing, Welch explains in a straightforward, jargon-free style how the cutoffs for treating a person with “abnormal” test results have been drastically lowered just when technological advances have allowed us to see more and more “abnormalities,” many of which will pose fewer health complications than the procedures that ostensibly cure them. Citing studies that show that 10% of 2,000 healthy people were found to have had silent strokes, and that well over half of men over age sixty have traces of prostate cancer but no impairment, Welch reveals overdiagnosis to be rampant for numerous conditions and diseases, including diabetes, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, gallstones, abdominal aortic aneuryisms, blood clots, as well as skin, prostate, breast, and lung cancers. With genetic and prenatal screening now common, patients are being diagnosed not with disease but with “pre-disease” or for being at “high risk” of developing disease. Revealing the economic and medical forces that contribute to overdiagnosis, Welch makes a reasoned call for change that would save us from countless unneeded surgeries, excessive worry, and exorbitant costs, all while maintaining a balanced view of both the potential benefits and harms of diagnosis. Drawing on data, clinical studies, and anecdotes from his own practice, Welch builds a solid, accessible case against the belief that more screening always improves health care.


Differential Diagnosis in Primary Care

Differential Diagnosis in Primary Care

Author: Nairah Rasul

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-04-20

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1405180366

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Formulating a diagnosis purely on the basis of clinical judgement can be fraught with difficulty and danger, yet this is the challenge faced every day by Primary Care physicians, who rarely have access to the diagnostic tools available to hospital-based colleagues. Differential Diagnosis in Primary Care has been specifically written with the needs of the Primary Care physician in mind. It examines the potential causes of common presentations and aims to help the physician differentiate between diseases, using history and examination alone. Diseases are listed in descending order of prevalence, with the commonest causes first, while high-risk conditions are highlighted to ensure they are not overlooked. Its unique tabulated format ensures key information is easily accessible, and the user-friendly format ensures the book can be used during consultations, home visits, and on ward rounds. Whether used by the undergraduate, postgraduate trainee or the experienced Primary Care physician, Differential Diagnosis in Primary Care is an invaluable tool designed to improve the reader's ability to diagnose on the basis of clinical judgement alone.


Physician’s Guide to the Laboratory Diagnosis of Metabolic Diseases

Physician’s Guide to the Laboratory Diagnosis of Metabolic Diseases

Author: N. Blau

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 732

ISBN-13: 364255878X

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This second edition of The Physician's Guide provides paediatricians and other physicians with a unique aid to help them select the correct diagnosis from a bewildering array of complex clinical and laboratory data. Delay and mistakes in the diagnosis of inherited metabolic diseases may have devastating consequences. The guide, which includes a CD-ROM, describes 298 disorders which have been grouped into 35 chapters according to the type of condition. Within each group of disorders, chapters provide tables of pertinent clinical findings as well as reference and pathological values for crucial metabolites. Relevant metabolic pathways and diagnostic flow charts are included. There are three indices to make the book as user-friendly as possible.


Every Patient Tells a Story

Every Patient Tells a Story

Author: Lisa Sanders

Publisher: Harmony

Published: 2010-09-21

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0767922476

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A riveting exploration of the most difficult and important part of what doctors do, by Yale School of Medicine physician Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of the monthly New York Times Magazine column "Diagnosis," the inspiration for the hit Fox TV series House, M.D. "The experience of being ill can be like waking up in a foreign country. Life, as you formerly knew it, is on hold while you travel through this other world as unknown as it is unexpected. When I see patients in the hospital or in my office who are suddenly, surprisingly ill, what they really want to know is, ‘What is wrong with me?’ They want a road map that will help them manage their new surroundings. The ability to give this unnerving and unfamiliar place a name, to know it—on some level—restores a measure of control, independent of whether or not that diagnosis comes attached to a cure. Because, even today, a diagnosis is frequently all a good doctor has to offer." A healthy young man suddenly loses his memory—making him unable to remember the events of each passing hour. Two patients diagnosed with Lyme disease improve after antibiotic treatment—only to have their symptoms mysteriously return. A young woman lies dying in the ICU—bleeding, jaundiced, incoherent—and none of her doctors know what is killing her. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Lisa Sanders takes us bedside to witness the process of solving these and other diagnostic dilemmas, providing a firsthand account of the expertise and intuition that lead a doctor to make the right diagnosis. Never in human history have doctors had the knowledge, the tools, and the skills that they have today to diagnose illness and disease. And yet mistakes are made, diagnoses missed, symptoms or tests misunderstood. In this high-tech world of modern medicine, Sanders shows us that knowledge, while essential, is not sufficient to unravel the complexities of illness. She presents an unflinching look inside the detective story that marks nearly every illness—the diagnosis—revealing the combination of uncertainty and intrigue that doctors face when confronting patients who are sick or dying. Through dramatic stories of patients with baffling symptoms, Sanders portrays the absolute necessity and surprising difficulties of getting the patient’s story, the challenges of the physical exam, the pitfalls of doctor-to-doctor communication, the vagaries of tests, and the near calamity of diagnostic errors. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Sanders chronicles the real-life drama of doctors solving these difficult medical mysteries that not only illustrate the art and science of diagnosis, but often save the patients’ lives.