Researchers at Houston-based Baylor College of Medicine partnered with Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger Health to develop a program to improve the accuracy and safety of clinical diagnosis.
The healthcare organizations will collaborate to establish The Safer DX Learning Lab to translate research into meaningful care improvements. The lab will focus on reducing diagnostic errors by developing a systematic approach to measure and improve accuracy using data from Geisinger's EHR and evaluating concerns directly from patients. Additionally, the lab will estimate the cost of a misdiagnosis.
"We have developed a Committee to Improve Clinical Diagnosis to target vulnerabilities in the diagnostic process and sustain a culture of diagnostic excellence," said Dennis Torretti, MD, associate CMO at Geisinger.
Hardeep Singh, MD chief of the Health Policy, Quality and Informatics Program at the Houston VA Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety and associate professor of medicine at Baylor, and his multidisciplinary team will head the project.
"Tools, strategies, innovations and lessons from this project would enable other health systems to learn from our experience and help scale up this program to other sites in the future," Dr. Singh said.
The partnership between Geisinger and Baylor will be facilitated by a Safer Dx Researcher in Residence who will act as a liaison between the research team and clinical operations team at Geisinger.
The new lab will be funded by a $3.5 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.