Doctors, like the rest of us, make mistakes. Every year, upward of 12 million Americans see a physician and come away with a wrong diagnosis. The top cause? Bad judgment, says David Newman-Toker, director of the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality’s Center for Diagnostic Excellence.
Newman-Toker found that judgment errors accounted for 86 percent of 55,377 medical malpractice claims he evaluated where misdiagnosis led to death or disability. The judgment blame bucket includes an assortment of knowledge gaps, inattentions, misinterpretations and what Angie Rosen believes led to the misdiagnosis of her stroke in August: implicit bias.
