Group items tagged

"Diagnostic accuracy was moderately associated with higher certainty only when clinical data were consistent. This correlation disappeared when incon sistent data were provided, possi bly reflecting changes in reasoning strategies among diagnostically success ful trainees. The relationship between certainty and diagnostic accuracy is context dependent. Certainty is an unreliable surrogate for diagnostic accuracy."

" Among malpractice claims, diagnostic errors appear to be the most common, most costly and most dangerous of medical mistakes. We found roughly equal numbers of lethal and non-lethal errors in our analysis, suggesting that the public health burden of diagnostic errors could be twice that previously estimated. Healthcare stakeholders should consider diagnostic safety a critical health policy issue. "

Diagnosis is the foundation of medicine. Effective treatment cannot begin until an accurate diagnosis has been made. Diagnostic reasoning is a critical aspect of clinical performance. It is vulnerable to a variety of failings, the most prevalent arising through cognitive and affective influences. The impact of diagnostic failure on patient safety does not appear to have been fully recognized. Ideally, all information used in diagnostic reasoning is objective and all thinking is logical and valid, but these conditions are not always met.

"The purpose of this article is to argue for the further investigation and revision of these initial attempts to apply checklists to the diagnostic process. The basic idea behind checklists is to provide an alternative to reliance on intuition and memory in clinical problem solving. This kind of solution is demanded by the complexity of diagnostic reasoning, which often involves sense-making under conditions of great uncertainty and limited time."

Here is a quick rundown of the top ten ultrasound technician and diagnostic medical sonographer schools in the country, in alphabetical order, according to US News in 2008.

"The trap that we nearly fell into is called anchoring bias. The patient was admitted to our team with the diagnosis of alcohol withdrawal. Once we had that label in our minds, we fit everything into that diagnostic box, anchoring all of his symptoms to that diagnosis, even ones that didn't quite fit."

"The NEJM Image Challenge app provides a great forum to keep one's diagnostic skills sharp, but has limitations in lack of robustness of explanations and inability to save particular images for later review."

"This report focuses on how clinical teachers can facilitate the learning process to help learners make the transition from being diagnostic novices to becoming expert clinicians"

100 Diagnostic Challenges in Clinical Medicine is composed of one hundred well-illustrated clinical scenarios and their appropriate investigations. A wide variety of specialties are covered including cardiology, neurology, dermatology, endocrinology, tropical medicine, haematology, metabolic medicine, radiology, ophthalmology, venereology, and infectious diseases. Presenting the relevant investigations corresponding to each case in an interesting and easy-to-read Q&A format concerning diagnosis and management

"STATworkUP™ has an immense amount of correlated data between symptoms, tests, diagnoses and treatments. While the app cannot be relied upon to thoroughly determine a differential diagnosis or provide an evidence-based summary of therapy, it can serve as an additional arrow in the clinicians quiver especially when wrestling with an uncommon diagnostic dilemma."

The tool was conceived by a research team from the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at UWE Bristol led by principal lecturer Simon Messer, and developed in collaboration with Avon Somerset and Wiltshire Cancer Services (ASWCs) who commissioned the project as part of the National Awareness and Early Diagnosis Initiative. The idea is that GPs can access GP Sim from their computer at a time that suits to fine tune their diagnostic skills.

"The two major products of clinical decision making are diagnoses and treatment plans. If the first is correct, the second has a greater chance of being correct too. Surprisingly, we don't make correct diagnoses as often as we think: the diagnostic failure rate is estimated to be 10 to 15%. "

Despite the relative brevity of the intervention, our course appeared to be effective in improving diagnostic performance in simulated clinical reasoning skills problems, as measured by the CRP, and was generally well received by students.

"Teaching clinical reasoning is important and feasible. Teachers who explicitly teach problem solving and decision making may help learners to improve their diagnostic accuracy and treatment choices."

"In this blog, we discussed diagnostic tests and their relationship with likelihood ratios as well as heuristics and cognitive errors."

"Compared to conscious processing, unconscious processing significantly increased the number of correct classifications. The results show the potential merits of unconscious processing in diagnostic decision making. "

This is the homepage for the Web2Rights project funded by JISC and developed to help academics and students gain abetter understanding of IPR issues and other legal issues in relation to Web 2.0. The site includes use-cases, a blog and discussion forum and links to an ip toolkit and ip diagnostic tool which will take you through a project you are working on help identify any IPR issues which you need to consider.

- The Ultimate Medical & Differential Diagnosis Reminder Tool

Get a list of possible diagnoses in seconds covering over 15,000 disease manifestations such as symptoms, labs, ECG, X-ray, CT-scan, MRI, ultrasound...

ePBLMs are actual patient cases in CD format that permits free inquiry. The learner can ask any question of the patient in any sequence and get the patient's response and perform any item of the physical examination in any sequence and learn the result as in the real clinical situation. Any laboratory and diagnostic test can be ordered in any sequence as well. Whatever can be done with the actual patient on history and physical and the ordering of laboratory tests can be done with the ePBLM. A separate "User's Guide" provided with each ePBLM can be used with any of the ePBLMs in the series and provides the key for free inquiry.

These established career schools and colleges provide reputable training in diagnostic medical sonography, preparing students for employment as ultrasound technicians. Programs include associate's and bachelor's degrees, as well as certificates for students who already hold a degree in another field.