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Posted Nov. 17 by the Wall Street Journal:

A patient with abdominal pain dies from a ruptured appendix after a doctor fails to do a complete physical exam. A biopsy comes back positive for prostate cancer, but no one follows up when the lab result gets misplaced. A child's fever and rash are diagnosed as a viral illness, but they turn out to be a much more serious case of bacterial meningitis.

Such devastating errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 patients each year, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Not only are diagnostic problems more common than other medical mistakes—and more likely to harm patients—but they're also the leading cause of malpractice claims.

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Medical schools, meanwhile, are teaching doctors to be more receptive to patient input and avoid "anchoring," the habit of focusing on one diagnosis and excluding other possible scenarios, and "premature closure," not even considering the correct diagnosis as a possibility.

The Critical Thinking program at мÓÆÂÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±Ö±²¥ in Halifax, Nova Scotia, established last year, aims to help trainees step back and examine how biases may affect their thinking. Developed by Pat Croskerry, a physician known for his research on the role of cognitive error in diagnosis, it uses a list of 50 different types of bias that may lead to diagnostic error.

The program is being integrated throughout four years of the medical school. Students study cases such as a psychiatric patient with shortness of breath who was assumed to be merely having an anxiety attack; doctors overlooked that she was a smoker on birth-control pills, a risk for the blood clot that later traveled to her lung and killed her.

"If we can teach physicians how to think more critically," Dr. Croskerry says, "they would be more effective in delivering good care and arriving at the right diagnosis."

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