The Importance of Cognitive Errors in Diagnosis and Strategies to Minimize Them

In the area of patient safety, recent attention has focused on diagnostic error. The reduction of diagnostic error is an important goal because of its associated morbidity and potential preventability. A critical subset of diagnostic errors arises through cognitive errors, especially those associated with failures in perception, failed heuristics, and biases; collectively, these have been referred to as cognitive dispositions to respond (CDRs). Historically, models of decision-making have given insufficient attention to the contribution of such biases, and there has been a prevailing pessimism against improving cognitive performance through debiasing techniques. Recent work has catalogued the major cognitive…