If the diagnosis isn’t right, there’s a pretty good chance the treatment won’t be right.
A while back I had an interesting conversation with folks from Best Doctors about this issue, and they provided some interesting statistics about the incidence of misdiagnosis.
- The American Journal of Medicine reported that at least 15% of all medical cases in developed countries are misdiagnosed.
- Even doctors are not immune to misdiagnosis: According to The New England Journal of Medicine, 35% of doctors have reported errors in their own care or that of a family member.
- A July 2012 BMJ [British Medical Journal] Quality & Safety paper found that of 5,863 autopsies studied, 28% had at least one misdiagnosis.
- A study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings of 100 autopsies found 26 of 100 patients who died in the hospital had been misdiagnosed. Same study also found “The number of missed major diagnoses remains high, and despite the introduction of more modern diagnostic techniques and of intensive and invasive monitoring, the number of missed major diagnoses has not essentially changed over the past 20 to 30 years.”
- Review of pathology resulted in changes in interpretation in 29% of breast cancer cases, while in 34% of cases, a change in surgical management was recommended. A second evaluation of patients referred to a multidisciplinary tumor board led to changes in the recommendations for surgical management in 77 of 149 of those patients studied (52%) (University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.)
Best Doctors’ own data for US-based cases in 2013 indicated they corrected or refined diagnoses in 37% of cases, and corrected or improved treatment in 75% of cases.
Of course, BD’s cases are more likely to have a misdiagnosis; their clients send them claims that look problematic.
With that said, there’s no question diagnosticians can get it wrong; in fairness, it can be pretty difficult to pinpoint the specific physiological or anatomical issue that is causing a patient’s symptoms. As an example, identifying the cause of back pain is notoriously difficult, especially when an MRI indicates an abnormality. Liberty Mutual’s recently-published research spoke to this issue directly:
Claims in which MRI was performed either within the first 30 days of pain onset or when there was no specific medical condition justifying the MRI yielded significantly higher medical costs, even after controlling for severity. The study found these early or non-indicated MRIs led to a cascade of medical services in the six-month period post-MRI that included electromyography, nerve conduction testing, advanced imaging, injections or surgery. These procedures often occurred soon after the MRI and were 17 to nearly 55 times more likely to occur than in similar claims without MRI.
“Being a highly sensitive test, MRI will quite often reveal common age-related changes that have no correlation to the anatomical source of the lower back pain,” said Glenn S. Pransky, MD, MOccH, Center for Disability Research.
What does this mean for you?
The lesson here is clear – too much reliance on technology can be counter-productive. And patients who demand MRIs are not helping themselves.
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