Measuring diagnostic error

Diagnostic error measurement is a developing field and has few fully developed and widely used tools. The following may be useful for organizational efforts to improve diagnostic safety.

Diagnostic Safety Supplemental Item Set for Medical Office SOPS

The Survey of Patient Safety for medical offices has a supplemental 12-item question set to help medical offices assess the extent to which their organizational culture supports the diagnostic process, accurate diagnoses, and communication around diagnoses. Questions are directed to providers and staff and ask for their opinions about time availability, testing and referrals, and communication around diagnosis.

Measure Dx

This toolkit guides health care organizations to detect, analyze, and learn from diagnostic safety events as part of a continuous learning and feedback cycle. This resource helps create a shared understanding of the task and a plan to identify and systematically collect data from events for shared learning and discovery. It can be used by healthcare entities from smaller practices to entire health systems.