When the U.S. Institute of Medicine released its landmark "To Err is Human" report in 1999, it failed to address the issue of physician misdiagnoses, according to a recent Star Tribune report.
Similarly, physicians and safety advocates alike have tackled many patient harm issues throughout the years — from mishandled prescriptions to botched surgeries — but have failed to pay the same amount of attention to misdiagnoses, according to the report.
Andrew Olsen, MD, who has developed training on diagnostic reasoning at the University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis, has taken up the task of acknowledging misdiagnoses and helping colleagues understand how to avoid them.
Dr. Olsen told the Star Tribune that as many as 5 percent to 15 percent of physicians' diagnoses are wrong, but patient safety experts have struggled to tackle the problem because it is more difficult to quantify than other problems, like leaving a sponge in a patient after surgery.
According to the report, IOM will finally give misdiagnoses its due attention this fall when it releases a report dedicated to the problem.
The findings of the IOM report will be featured at an upcoming national medical conference. Dr. Olsen will also present at the conference, discussing the approach he developed two years ago to train medical residents how to identify and learn from the causes of misdiagnoses, according to the report.