Patient perspectives offer unique information about how diagnosis-related events alter patients’ trajectories through the healthcare system and their expectations for clinicians. This brief, the first of two on learning from patient experiences, explores:
- How patient-reported experiences can augment other methods of identifying diagnostic failures.
- How patient feedback about the diagnostic process and its outcomes can enrich clinicians’ understanding of patient and family experience and reduce the harms that follow adverse diagnostic events.
- What questions about learning from patients’ diagnostic experience remain in need of future research.
Key insights about learning from patient experience to address diagnostic problems include:
- To obtain representative accounts of patients’ diagnostic experiences, it is important to ask questions about diagnostic issues using broad language, rather than trying to give patients and families more precise definitions of “medical errors” or “mistakes.”
- Although patient and family conceptions of adverse events do not always conform to clinical definitions of diagnostic errors, it is important to identify and understand the broader scope of patient-defined adverse experiences, in part because these shape subsequent trust and care-seeking behaviors.
- To assess the full implications of diagnostic mishaps for patients and families, it is essential to elicit their experiences involving both the mishap itself and its aftermath.
- Feedback from patient experiences can be useful for addressing diagnostic failures in two distinct ways: first, as verbatim narratives that identify concrete, actionable changes and second, based on quantifiable metrics that can be extracted from those narratives.
- Learning from patient and family experiences can potentially improve diagnosis through both changes in clinician-patient interactions and system-level responses that address the harms that persist in the aftermath of a diagnostic mishap.
