The costs of misdiagnosis as covered in STAT. While hard to quantify this illustrates an opportunity for AI-enabled clinical decision support tools to augment clinician observations and help look at additional possibilities of diagnoses. Medical knowledge is too big now to not have diagnostic and decision support.
"An estimated 371,000 people die every year following a misdiagnosis, and 424,000 are permanently disabled — a total of 800,000 people suffering “serious harm,” said David Newman-Toker, the lead author of the paper and a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and director of its Center for Diagnostic Excellence...misdiagnoses typically don’t lead to severe consequences, because most times people aren’t visiting the doctor with a serious condition. That’s different, though, for the minority of people who walk into the doctor’s office with serious, potentially fatal, conditions — say, someone who feels dizzy because of the onset of a stroke, but is diagnosed with vertigo instead, or a young woman whose breast cancer is missed during a routine check-up. For them, the study found, the risk of death associated with misdiagnosis is 4%, and the risk of severe disability 11%. "
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