Approximately 1 in 4 hospital patients are misdiagnosed, according to a new study.
Published in the scientific journal JAMA Internal Medicine, the study was conducted using the information of over 24,000 hospitalized adults who were admitted to the ICU in the course of a year.
Of these patients, 550 patients, or approximately 23%, were misdiagnosed. Amongst these patients, approximately 436 were temporarily injured, permanently injured or passed away. About 121, or 18%, of the patients who died in the ICU passed away because of a medical misdiagnosis.
“We know diagnostic errors are dangerous, and hospitals are obviously interested in reducing their frequency, but it’s much harder to do this when we don’t know what’s causing these errors or what their direct impact is on individual patients,” said the senior author Jeffrey L. Schnipper, MD, MPH, per a statement. “We found that diagnostic errors can largely be attributed to either errors in testing, or errors in assessing patients, and this knowledge gives us new opportunities to solve these problems.”
In previous studies, researchers have found that BIPOC patients and women are more likely to be misdiagnosed by professionals than white men are.
Per a July study released in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal, they are 20% to 30% more likely to be incorrectly diagnosed.
According to numerous reports, misdiagnosis is most common among Black Americans, particularly when it comes to mental health issues.
Among hospitalized adults transferred to the ICU or who died in the hospital, diagnostic errors were common, harmful, and had underlying causes, which can be used to design future interventions. https://t.co/P32USkmVwN
— JAMA Internal Medicine (@JAMAInternalMed) January 8, 2024
In a 2019 study, researchers found that Black Americans are most often misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.
Released by the scientific journal Psychiatric Services, Rutgers researchers reported that Black Americans were more likely to have severe depression than any other demographic but were most often incorrectly diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The misdiagnosis highlighted existing racial bias in medical professionals who failed to acknowledge mood symptoms in cases of either depression and schizophrenia mental health issues.
With the latest study, medical professionals involved are advocating for the usage of AI to help diagnose patients.
Along with addressing any disparities that exist in current diagnostic tools and training, they highlight that AI can help eliminate any delays in treatment after providing the most accurate tests and analysis.
Still, the researchers are also emphasizing the improvement of medical professionals themselves.
“In the end, helping physicians become better diagnosticians means coaching and training physicians, and helping physicians clearly explain diagnoses to patients,” said the author of the study, Andrew Auerbach, per a News Medical report. “I suspect AI will help with many tasks, but we still have work to improve communication between patients and healthcare team members to fully advance the field.”
