The American College of Radiology (ACR) has issued a statement in support of a new report from the U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) on reducing diagnostic errors.
Released on September 22, the IOM report offers eight goals for reducing errors and improving diagnosis in healthcare:
- Facilitating better teamwork in the diagnostic process among healthcare professionals, patients, and families
- Enhancing the education and training of healthcare professionals in the diagnostic process
- Ensuring that healthcare IT supports patients and healthcare professionals in the diagnostic process
- Developing approaches to learn from and reduce diagnostic errors and near misses
- Establishing a work system that supports the diagnostic process and improvements in diagnostic performance
- Developing an environment that enables learning from reporting diagnostic errors and near misses
- Designing a payment and care delivery system that supports the diagnostic process
- Providing funding for research on the diagnostic process and diagnostic errors
ACR congratulated the IOM committee that developed the report. It said it supports the IOM recommendation that heath systems use informatics to give providers the latest evidence-based information through clinical decision-support systems embedded in clinical workflow. Its ACR Appropriateness Criteria and ACR Select software are examples of tools that could be used to implement the IOM recommendations, according to the organization.
