This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Informatics/ Internet in Medicine  • Informatics, Other  • Patient-Physician Communication  • Patient Safety/ Medical Error  • Diagnosis  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Giuseppe Lippi, MD; Mario Plebani, MD

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

The health care context is characterized by a high degree of complexity, involving a kaleidoscope of medical disciplines. Although medical errors are traditionally deemed as incorrect diagnoses, as mishandled clinical procedures, or, globally, as results of inappropriate clinical decision making, diagnostic errors are a frequent occurrence, which may have an impact on patient's care and ultimately jeopardize patient's safety.¹ Wrong, missed, or delayed diagnoses can result from a variety of causes, including failure to order an appropriate diagnostic test, identification errors, tests performed on unsuitable specimens, release of results despite a poor performance of quality controls, delayed notification of critical values, and incorrect interpretation of test results.¹

In a recent article in the Archives, Casalino et al² showed that failure to inform patients or to document informing patients of abnormal outpatient test results appears to be relatively common, occurring in 1 of every . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION


CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?