Forum Session Announcement - Diagnostic Errors: A Threat to Health and Impediment to Health Reform

Forum Session Announcement - Diagnostic Errors: A Threat to Health and Impediment to Health Reform F O R U M S E S S I O N Diagnostic Errors: A Threat to Health and Impediment to Health ReformMARCH 25, 2016 Physicians and other clinicians sometimes make errors in diagnosing medical conditions. [...] major national initiatives to improve patient safety or implement value-based purchasing focus on improving the accuracy and timeliness of diagnosis, which could be a missed opportunity to fill in knowledge gaps.5 Some experts believe that this failure to consider diagnostic errors in the development of health reform policies, such as standards for health information technology or new payment meth. [...] The Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine has also focused on Medicare’s conditions of participation, advocating to include “structural elements and performance measurement of certain processes related to diagnosis errors.”10 SESSION In this session, three members of the IOM panel on improving diagnosis—Anupam B. [...] Jena, MD, PhD, associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School; Mark Graber, MD, president of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine, senior fellow at RTI International, and professor emeritus, State University of New York, Stony Brook; and Robert Berenson, MD, institute fellow at the Urban Institute—offered their perspectives on the costs, causes, and consequences of dia. [...] The Institute of Medicine’s 2015 report Improving Diagnosis in Health Care defines diagnostic error as “the failure to (a) establish an accurate and timely explanation of the patient’s health problems(s) or (b) communicate that explanation to the patient.” Insitute of Medicine (IOM), Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, National Academies Press, National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medic.