12 Million Outpatients Seriously Injured as a Result of Diagnostic Errors
A recent study by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine estimates that 12,000,000 people seeking medical treatment in outpatient clinics are injured by diagnostic errors in such clinics.
Common symptoms are often missed in cases like decompensated heart failure, pneumonia, anemia, spinal cord compression, and kidney failure. “It’s important to outline the fact that this is a problem,” said Dr. Hardeep Singh, the study’s lead author and a patient safety researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, also in Houston. “Because of the large number of outpatient visits, this is a huge vulnerability. This is a huge number and we need to do something about it,” he said in an interview with Reuters.
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