A new study finds that nearly 6% of the estimated 130 million people who go to US emergency rooms every year end up with the wrong diagnosis. That’s one in 18 patients.
The report, published Thursday by the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, reviewed almost 300 studies published between January 2000 and September 2021. The researchers estimate that 7.4 million diagnostic errors are made every year and that 2.6 million people receive harm that could have been avoided. More grimly, another 370,000 are permanently disabled or die because of the misdiagnosis.
For every emergency room in the nation, the math shakes out to be about 1,400 diagnostic errors every year per emergency room across the country.
The top five conditions that were misdiagnosed and accounted for 39% of all were:
- stroke
- myocardial infarction
- aortic aneurysm/dissection
- spinal cord compression/injury
- venous thromboembolism
Ten of the country’s leading emergency physician groups, including the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Board of Emergency Medicine, issued a letter to counter the report. They write that the report is “misleading” and “incomplete.”
The groups say that characterizing the diagnoses as errors is incorrect and a misunderstanding of the aim of emergency medicine, which is to focus on the acute and immediate problems at hand.
