More doctors means more accurate diagnoses

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A Hive Mind of Doctors Can Mean Better Care for Patients By Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Every year, 5% of American adults with a medical complaint are misdiagnosed and often misprescribed a treatment. Worse, among hospitalized Americans, misdiagnosis costs up to 100,000 lives per year. But according to a new study, there might be a way to improve those numbers: get more doctors involved in the business of diagnosing any one case.  Researchers recruited 2,941 physicians and divided them into two groups. In one group, the doctors were presented with case studies of real patients and instructed to diagnose the condition and prescribe a treatment. Each of the doctors worked alone. In the second group, the doctors analyzed a similar case study, but after they made their diagnosis and their treatment recommendation, they were given the opportunity to read the responses of 40 other members of the group. They then had the option of changing their analysis. The results showed there is benefit to the hive mind. Before reading the other doctors’ responses, each group of 40 averaged an accuracy rate of 76.1%. After reading the shared diagnosis and prescriptions, the accuracy number jumped to 81.1%, or a 6.6% improvement over the initial figure. In a country with a potential patient population of 332 million, that 6.6% translates to 21.8 million people. READ MORE Share This Story

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AN EXPERT VOICE “We see the rise of the financial sector and the influence of financial actors as affecting all areas of healthcare as well as public health. Our goal in research is to motivate policymakers, but also patients and also public health scholars to really be thinking about and studying the expanding role of the financial sector in our in our nation's health system.” —Joseph Dov Bruch, an assistant professor of public health sciences at the University of Chicago who studies private equity in healthcare

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