According to WHO, diagnostic errors account for nearly about 16% of preventable harm in health systems. For this reason, on the occasion of World Patient Safety Day to improve diagnosis, the Practicum Foundation offers medical students and professionals the Practicum Script clinical reasoning simulator. Practicum Script aims to mitigate cognitive failures, which are behind 75% of medical errors and are therefore not only a question of patient safety but also of cost overruns for healthcare systems.
Madrid, 17 Septembre 2024. Today, 17 September, the World Health Organisation (WHO) seeks to highlight the importance of correct and timely diagnosis, acting on systemic problems and cognitive factors that can lead to errors, to look after the sick. Under the slogan “Get it right, make it safe!”, Member States call for the provision of quality diagnostic tools, as well as encouraging practitioners to continuously develop their clynical thinking skills. These interventions include the adoption of technology-based solutions to measure and learn from errors.
The Practicum Foundation joins forces with WHO on World Patient Safety Day by inviting the medical community to request a trial demo of Practicum Script and start optimising their critical judgement. The initiative, which will be available until 17 October, targets both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. In the case of students and residents, Practicum Script has proven to be useful in shortening their clinical maturation time, while among specialists the renowned virtual platform of real clinical cases aims to refine the quality of their clinical reasoning. For all of them, the main advantage would be that it allows to reproduce the analytical and non-analytical cognitive processes involved in decision-making to strengthen clinical care.
Through longitudinal exposure to cases based on flesh-and-blood patient records, which reproduce scenarios of uncertainty, Practicum Script intends to curb medical error, which is considered the third leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the world and usually has its origin in reasoning failures rather than in a deficit of knowledge. Cognitive psychology research, on which the didactics is founded, indicates that doctors make mistakes when they encounter complex problems and/or have little time or limited resources. In response to this, Practicum Script offers participants the opportunity to learn with dilemmatic challenges from everyday practice to be solved in their own time.
More than just labelling a disease
In any case, the United Nations agency stresses that understanding the diagnostic process is fundamental to reducing errors. These errors can occur at any stage, including the initial presentation of the patient, history taking and anamnesis, possible tests to rule out differential diagnoses, discussion and communication of results, and the final diagnosis, accompanied by a treatment plan, follow-up and reassessment.
Along these lines, Practicum Script presents a comprehensive evaluation of clinical reasoning: from the generation of hypotheses (heuristic reasoning), to their corroboration (inductive reasoning), to decision-making in the face of new clinical data (hypothetico-deductive reasoning) and reflection on how we have reached certain conclusions (metacognition). Among others, this iterative succession of different steps prevents certain cognitive shortcuts or biases, as well as the classic problem of premature closure, and helps participants to understand and weigh different plausible approaches without risk to patient safety.
For WHO, “with most adults likely to face at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, substantial work needs to be done to improve the safety of diagnostic processes.”
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