STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — An expansive study found that an estimated 795,000 Americans either die or are left permanently disabled by misdiagnosis every year, underscoring the need to address the persistent public health issue.
The research, conducted by Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence and published July 17 in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety, is considered one of the most extensive analyses of diagnostic error in health care settings.
“Prior work has generally focused on errors occurring in a specific clinical setting, such as primary care, the emergency department or hospital-based care,” Dr. David Newman-Toker, lead investigator and director of the Center for Diagnostic Excellence, said in a release.
“These studies could not address the total serious harms across multiple care settings, the previous estimates of which varied widely from 40,000 to 4 million per year,” said Newman-Toker. “The methods used in our study are notable because they leverage disease-specific error and harm rates to estimate an overall total.”
Researchers first measured how often specific diseases were incorrectly diagnosed and how often that misdiagnosis led to health issues or death by pulling data from previous studies. Then, the study extrapolated incidence for the 15 diseases causing the most harm to come up with a national estimate.
That method found 371,000 deaths and 424,000 permanent disabilities were the result of improper diagnoses of diseases or medical conditions.
The vast majority of those figures are from misdiagnosis of vascular events, infections and cancers — accounting for 75% of serious harms. Stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, venous thromboembolism and lung cancer account for 37.5% of total serious harms, the study said.
Overall, the average error rate across diseases was 11.1%, but varied widely by condition or disease — from 1.5% for heart attack to 62% for spinal abscesses. Stroke, missed in 17.5% of cases, was considered the…
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