Reaching 95%: decision support tools are the surest way to improve diagnosis now

Rory Staunton, a 12 year-old boy, presented with fever, vomiting and mottled skin. Was this gastroenteritis? Thomas Duncan’s symptoms were headache, dizziness, nausea, abdominal pain and fever after recent travel from West Africa. Was this sinusitis? These two classic cases of diagnostic error beg the question of why the correct diagnosis was missed, and in his classic paper, George Bordage provided a very plausible answer: ‘I just didn’t think of it.’1 That is where clinical decision support tools for diagnosis (CDS-Dx), the so-called ‘symptom checkers’, come in. They work, and would likely have helped the clinicians consider the correct diagnosis in these cases: Rory Staunton’s streptococcal sepsis2 or Thomas Duncan’s Ebola infection,3 both of which had a fatal outcome. CDS-Dx work The report by Sibbald et al published in this issue of BMJ Quality & Safety adds to the growing evidence that...
Source: Quality and Safety in Health Care - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Editorials Source Type: research