A new study by the prestigious Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality shows just how bad the care in emergency departments is. In fact, the study found that 1 out of every 18 patients in a hospital’s emergency department is misdiagnosed.
The agency studied publications from 2000 through 2021 to determine the rate of misdiagnosis in the emergency department at hospitals throughout the country. Their findings include:
- Among the 130 million emergency department visits per year in the US, 7.4 million patients are misdiagnosed
- 2.6 million of those patients suffer an adverse event as a result of the misdiagnosis
- 370,000 people suffer serious harms from diagnostic error.
These numbers are even more striking when they are broken down per emergency department. The study found that for an average emergency department, there are 50 deaths per year due to misdiagnosis. These deaths do not include all the other deaths due to medical malpractice, they are only due to misdiagnosis.
The five conditions most likely to be misdiagnosed were: (1) stroke, (2) myocardial infarction, (3) aortic aneurysm/dissection, (4) spinal cord compression/injury, and (5) venous thromboembolism. These 5 conditions accounted for 39% of serious misdiagnosis-related harms. Infections, in particular, are responsible for 23% of misdiagnosis harms. The study also found that nonspecific or atypical symptoms increase the likelihood of error. This finding may seem unsurprising, but it shouldn’t be. Doctors, specifically emergency room doctors, are specifically taught not to assume a patient does not have a life-threatening or serious condition simply because the signs and symptoms are atypical. Any person can Google his or her symptoms and try to self-diagnose. Doctors are trained to critically examine the patient to consider all potential options, even if the signs and symptoms are atypical. The fact that they are ignoring this obligation is dangerous.
Unfortunately, the rates of medical malpractice in emergency departments does not seem to be slowing down. Patients in our communities, including Phoenix, Tucson, and Flagstaff, will continue to be subjected to medical malpractice. That is why medical malpractice lawsuits are so important.
