Thursday, July 30, 2009

4 pitfalls in clinical decision making – from “How Doctors Think”

In his book How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman, MD, identified traps that physicians must avoid on the path to a clinical decision, including these:
  1. "Satisfaction of the search." The tendency to fall back on lower-level decision-making rules when we want to eliminate alternatives.
  2. "Diagnosis momentum." The tendency to ignore findings that might lead us in a different direction than the one we're already headed in.
  3. "Commission bias." The tendency to do something rather than watching and waiting.
  4. "Intuitive leaps." The tendency to make a jump to a diagnosis that may not be supported by evidence or even by logic.
Could these pitfalls also apply to those of us in the clinical “innovating” business?

No comments: