JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

According to the recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report (September, 2015), Improving Diagnosis in Healthcare, each of us is likely to experience one diagnostic error in our lifetime, often with devastating consequences. Traditionally, diagnostic decision-making has been the sole responsibility of an individual clinician. However, diagnosis involves an interaction among interprofessional team members with different training, skills, cultures, knowledge and backgrounds. Moreover, diagnostic error is prevalent in the interruption-prone environment, such as the emergency department (ED), due to loss of information that is crucial for forming a correct diagnosis.

Objective:

The overall purpose of this proposal is to improve team-based diagnostic decision-making by focusing on data analytics and informatics tools that improve collective information management.

Methods:

To achieve this goal, we will identify the factors contributing to failures in team-based diagnostic decision-making (Aim 1); understand the barriers of using current health IT tools for team collaboration (Aim 2); and develop and evaluate a collaborative decision-making prototype that can improve team-based diagnostic decision-making (Aim 3).

Results:

We are conducting preliminary data collection of the studies between time period of 2019-2020. Results are expected to be published between 2020-2021.

Conclusions:

This study and results can shed light on improving diagnostic decision-making by incorporating diagnostics rationale from team members. We believe a positive direction to move forward in solving diagnostic errors is by incorporating all team members and using informatics can pave the way forward.