CRICO Supports IOM Report, “Improving Diagnosis in Health Care”

Cambridge, MA September 24, 2015: The greatly anticipated report, Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, released by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, shines a light on the risks to patients and providers in missed, delayed, or wrong diagnoses. Included in the report, in addition to three case studies, are several references to the analysis done for the CRICO Strategies 2014 Benchmarking Report Malpractice Risks in the Diagnostic Process.

“CRICO has long been focused on understanding the key drivers of diagnostic error and patient harm,” says Dana Siegal, RN, CPHRM, Director of Patient Safety of CRICO Strategies. Siegal also serves on the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) Board of Directors. Siegal continued, “We welcome the light that the IOM has shone on the critical issues of diagnostic error and are especially encouraged by its recommendation that medical professional liability insurers collaborate with health care professionals to improve the diagnostic process through education, training, and practice improvement.”

For nearly 40 years, CRICO has leveraged learnings from claims analysis to drive improvement initiatives in the Harvard medical community. In 1998, this methodology was extend beyond the Harvard community to develop CBS, a national comparative benchmarking system. Today, CBS exceeds 300,000 MPL claims representing more than 20 captive and commercial insurers, who participate in comparative analysis and sharing of best practices.

Mark E. Reynolds, President of CRICO said, “We are pleased to see the IOM report recognize the role of claims analysis in understanding the diagnostic process and mitigating risk. Understanding and addressing diagnosis-related errors has been, and will continue to be, a focus for CRICO.”

As cited in the IOM Report, “CRICO’s benchmarking studies demonstrate the utility of these data (malpractice claims) for understanding where in the diagnostic process errors are most likely to occur and what factors contributed to the error. This can be useful for designing both monitoring and improvement programs.”

Reynolds agrees with Dr. Victor Dzau, MD, President of the IOM, about the need for a collaborative effort to solve this problem. CRICO has been convening health care professionals within the Harvard community for decades and in 2010 formed the Academic Medical Center Patient Safety Organization (AMC PSO) to function as a national convener of clinicians and health care organizations to collect, aggregate, and analyze data, in a secure environment. Reynolds said, “CRICO is proud and energized to contribute to this ongoing dialog and exploration of solutions.”