Hospital Diagnostic Errors Send Nearly 1 in 4 Patients to ICU, Study Finds

Diagnostic errors in U.S. hospitals are sending nearly one in four patients to the intensive care unit, according to the results of a new study. In the cohort study conducted by a team from UC San Francisco and the University of Colorado School of Medicine, it was found that 23 percent of patients either received incorrect diagnoses or experienced delays in diagnosis. Of these cases, 17 percent resulted in temporary or permanent harm to the patient. The study’s results are published in the January edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. To determine diagnostic errors, the research team looked at 2,428 records of patients who had been admitted to 29 hospitals across the U.S. in 2019. A little over half of the patient records were male (54 percent) and the average age of the patient was 63.9-years-old. Roughly two-thirds of the patients were white....