Diagnosis in the Age of Personalized Medicine
May 21, 2013 | Terry Sharrer
In their 2011 book, “Medicine in Denial,” Larry and Lincoln Weed analyzed the common causes of medical misdiagnosis and offered several insights into how diagnostic errors can be reduced—now running at about 150,000 harm-causing mistakes annually in the US. The Weeds propose that a common format for recording patients’ symptoms is a first step toward computation analysis, noting that computers don’t suffer from sleep deprivation. Interestingly, they believe physicians should be periodically tested and certified, based on their diagnostic performance rather than their education, and that the certification be made public. MORE