AHRQ Leaders Join Effort To Improve Accuracy and Timeliness of Diagnosis

AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna, M.B.A., and Jeff Brady, M.D., M.P.H., who directs AHRQ’s Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety, joined leaders from more than 40 organizations on Sept. 13 in Washington, D.C., to launch a new effort to highlight the importance of diagnostic safety. The initiative, ACT for Better Diagnosis, is sponsored by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine to raise awareness about the need to better ensure that all patients receive diagnoses that are accurate, communicated and timely. Each year, an estimated 12 million people are affected by diagnostic errors, and approximately 4 million suffer serious harm. The cost of diagnostic errors to the U.S. health care system has been estimated at more than $100 billion annually. “We have open funding announcements to allow researchers to continue identifying solutions and interventions to this enormous challenge,” Khanna said. Dr. Brady noted that AHRQ’s ongoing work in this area, including AHRQ’s Patient Safety Learning Labs, is helping to fill gaps in knowledge about diagnostic safety at transitions of care and in diverse settings of care.