US emergency services make 7.4 million diagnostic errors each year

About one in every 18 people admitted to emergency medical services in the United States annually are misdiagnosed. Information from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Department of Health and Human Services American country, and released this Thursday (15). According to the agency, this figure corresponds to 6% of the approximately 130 million comments made to emergency care services. That is a total of 7.4 million.

To obtain these data, researchers reviewed 300 studies published between January 2000 and September 2021. Report, the diseases that receive the most false reports are: myocardial infarction, aneurysm, spinal cord injury, stroke, and venous thromboembolism. These five diagnoses represent 39% of all serious harms related to them.

The consequences of these errors result in an average of 370,000 deaths and permanent disability in service users, and 2.6 million other complications that could have been avoided.

A major rationale for errors identified in research is the differential diagnosis of a given condition. For example, when a stroke occurs, 17% of patients leave the hospital undiagnosed. “Patients who had this symptom when they walked into the emergency room [e receberam o parecer médico equivocado] After a few minutes there was a stroke”, highlights the text.

Women are 20% to 30% more likely to be misdiagnosed.