Accurate diagnoses in health care settings are critical to patient health. Millions of people are misdiagnosed in the United States every year, resulting in delayed treatment, unnecessary procedures, serious injuries, and even death. Diagnostic errors also create a significant financial burden for patients and the health care system.
Doctors misdiagnose patients for a variety of reasons, including, failing to recognize symptoms, not ordering vital tests, and failing to collect patients’ complete family, medical histories from patients and not listening to or ignoring patient complaints. A lack of funding to address the diagnostic error rate exacerbates the problem. Critical changes are necessary to make a positive impact on misdiagnosis statistics.
Understanding Diagnostic Errors
Doctors and other health care workers have difficult jobs, but this is no excuse for making preventable errors that lead to misdiagnoses. These include missed or delayed diagnoses and misinterpretations that lead to incorrect diagnoses.
A recent study revealed alarming misdiagnosis statistics and the impact of diagnostic errors. Some key findings include:
- As much as 75 percent of all serious harm resulting from misdiagnosis involves vascular events, infections, and cancers.
- Five misdiagnosed conditions—stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, venous thromboembolism, and lung cancer— cause nearly 39 percent of serious harmful results.
- Misdiagnoses of fifteen dangerous diseases account for almost 51 percent of serious harmful results.
- Stroke was the top cause of serious harm from misdiagnosis—17.5 percent of all cases.
- An estimated 795,000 Americans die or are permanently disabled annually because of misdiagnoses.
- Of these, 371,000 resulted in deaths from medical errors, and 424,000 led to permanent disability.
- The overall error rate across diseases is 11.1 percent.
Data Limitations
The underlying data that researchers use to study diagnostic errors has some limitations. For example, patients, doctors, and health care facilities don’t report all misdiagnoses.
Researchers must define terms like “serious harm” to collect valid data that sheds light on misdiagnoses. However, a misdiagnosis poses severe financial consequences for the tens of millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. There is also little data on the severe emotional harm patients suffer from a misdiagnosis.
“I have been reviewing medical misdiagnosis cases for over 20 years. Unfortunately, it is too common to see lives and families devastated by avoidable misdiagnosis. In addition, patients frequently are not told about the error or given the answers they deserve by the health care system.”
Daniel Harwin, Managing Partner
Why These Diagnostic Errors Occur
Sometimes, doctors make unavoidable mistakes that don’t rise to the level of malpractice. However, when doctors fail to provide the level of care a reasonable doctor would in similar circumstances, they may be negligent. Doctors are negligent in failing to diagnose, misdiagnosing, or delaying diagnoses for several reasons, including the following:
Misinterpreted Symptoms
The U.S. government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that nonspecific, transient, mild, or atypical symptoms were the most frequent factors in emergency room diagnostic errors.
Atypical symptoms are those that aren’t commonly associated with a given condition. For example, atypical heart attack symptoms include fatigue, nausea, dizziness, and pain in areas other than the chest. If doctors fail to consider medical history, risk factors, and other information and fail to run an electrocardiogram, or EKG, they may misdiagnose the patient.
Inadequate Medical History Evaluation
To properly diagnose patients, doctors must take the time to consider their family history, other risk factors, and pre-existing conditions. These components of patients’ lives can determine whether testing is necessary despite a patient only displaying atypical symptoms.
Some health conditions strongly linked to family history include heart disease, stroke, diabetes, or cancer. Doctors who fail to take a complete family history may misdiagnose these patients because they fail to recognize they are at a higher risk.
Doctors may also misdiagnose patients because they fail to account for current risk factors. For example, drinking alcohol increases the risk of six different types of cancer. Three or more alcoholic drinks per day make the risk even higher. Drinking alcohol is also a risk factor for several other diseases.
Pre-existing conditions put patients at risk for other health problems. For example, some of the risk factors for a stroke include prior TIA within 72 hours (transient ischemic attack), diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and sickle cell disease. If a patient has any symptoms of a stroke, doctors must recognize these pre-existing conditions as risk factors and order the proper tests to give an accurate diagnosis.
Failure to Order or Properly Read Tests
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2024 found that 23 percent of patients transferred to an intensive care unit or who died in the hospital had a missed or delayed diagnosis. Of the errors, 17 percent led to temporary or permanent patient harm. The researchers found that faults in testing and clinical assessment were the biggest factors in diagnostic errors.
Critical tests for conditions that doctors often misdiagnose include the following:
- EKGs for heart attacks
- Blood tests for cancer, sepsis, and other conditions
- Ultrasounds to diagnose conditions such as gallbladder disease, thyroid problems, or prostate issues
- Computerized tomography, or CT scan, to find tumors and check for internal bleeding or damage
- Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to observe the brain and other organs
- Biopsies to diagnose cancer
There are several steps you can take if you think your doctor has misdiagnosed you. If you believe it is due to a failure to test, ask them about it. If necessary, seek a second opinion as soon as possible.
Hospital or Other Health Care Setting Management
Organizations such as hospitals are responsible for hiring qualified health care workers and adequately training and overseeing them. When they fail to respond to complaints about missed diagnoses or other failures, they leave the door open to future mistakes that cost patients physically, financially, and emotionally.
In a recent example, the Iowa Board of Medicine sanctioned a doctor for repeatedly failing to diagnose breast cancer. This action occurred after 2019 sanctions by the New Hampshire Board of Medicine for repeatedly missing cancer diagnoses. After Iowa sanctioned the doctor, he began practicing in Michigan.
“Examples from cases that I’ve worked on in the past include where a gentleman came into a neurologist, and he actually had hydrocephalus, which is water on the brain. [This] is easily remedied by placing a shunt that drains the fluid. And instead, he was told he had Parkinson’s disease. He was put on medication that not only would not help, it made things worse, and the actual problem that could have been alleviated was left. And it actually caused long-term damage. That is just one example.”
Bias in Diagnosis and Treatment
Doctors do not always stay current on risk factors affecting specific population segments. For example, women who experience cardiovascular events are more likely than men to be rehospitalized and have higher mortality rates. This disparity is related to factors such as a failure to consider how recognized risk factors affect women differently.
A nationwide survey found only 22 percent of primary care physicians and 42 percent of cardiologists felt extremely well-prepared to assess women’s cardiovascular disease risk. These results occurred even though the disease is the number one killer of women in the United States.
The Economic Burden of Diagnostic Errors
Unnecessary testing, inappropriate treatment, extended hospital stays, and other issues related to diagnostic errors have a significant financial impact on families and individuals in the form of lost income and medical bills.
Moreover, estimates of the overall cost to the U.S. health care system may be up to $100 billion annually. Despite the enormous impact of diagnostic errors, Congress has only allocated about $15 to $20 million of the $40 billion federal health research budget to the problem.
Strategies to Reduce Diagnostic Errors
Several potential solutions aim to improve diagnostic accuracy and reduce the number of misdiagnoses. One option is to take a disease-focused approach. Reducing diagnostic errors by 50 percent for lung cancer, stroke, pneumonia, pulmonary embolism, and sepsis could reduce harmful results from medical errors by as many as 150,000 per year.
More specific approaches can also help reduce diagnostic errors. Technology such as virtual patient simulators, portable eye movement recordings, and computer-based algorithms could reduce diagnostic errors by as much as 50 percent for conditions such as pneumonia, stroke, and sepsis.
A more comprehensive approach is the use of Diagnostic Safety Centers of Excellence. In 2022, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality awarded 10 grants to open these centers nationwide.
These facilities focus on various aspects of diagnostic errors, such as testing problems, why some diseases often receive a misdiagnosis, and patient factors contributing to errors. The data and best practices compiled at these facilities may significantly impact how doctors and medical facilities approach diagnostics and may positively impact misdiagnosis statistics.
Challenges and the Road Ahead
The lack of funding for diagnostic error research is a significant obstacle to reducing patient harm and financial losses. There is a need for increased investment in research and development of new technologies. We also need additional research into properly training doctors to recognize the symptoms of diseases for which misdiagnoses cause the most harm.
Training for doctors and other health care professionals shouldn’t stop when their academic careers are over. Several areas of improvement in diagnostics that facilities can emphasize in ongoing training include:
- Teamwork
- Patient and family communication
- Communication with other health care professionals
- A greater emphasis on ordering diagnostic tests
- Applying test results to decision-making
- Increased training in the use of health care technology
Facilities can also reduce misdiagnosis errors by reducing telemetry missteps. Telemetry monitors give real-time information on vital signs such as blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and heart rhythms. When nurses or other staff misread the data or fail to relay it properly to other members of a patient’s team, a delayed or missed diagnosis may occur.
How Freedland Harwin Valori Gander Can Help
Our medical malpractice lawyers at FHVG have been helping people victims of medical misdiagnosis and medical malpractice for over 20 years. We are recognized locally and nationally as a firm dedicated to seeking justice for our clients. Our record of success in getting them fair compensation for their damages speaks for itself.
We’ve recovered over $2.6 billion for our deserving clients, including $9 million in a misdiagnosis case for the family of a woman who died after being discharged from the hospital despite symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage.
At Freedland Harwin Valori Gander, we take our medical malpractice cases on a contingency basis. You don’t pay us unless we win.
If you or a loved one has experienced harm from a diagnostic error, call us today at (954) 467-6400 or complete our contact form to request a free consultation.
