Why adopt diagnosis decision support systems (DDSS) ?
As DDSS demonstrate their impact on patient safety, healthcare costs and efficiencies, an increasing number of healthcare institutions are adopting DDSS either as a standalone system or interfaced with EMR. An article by George J. Annas, J.D., M.P.H. in a recent issue of the NEJM, The Patient’s Right to Safety Improving the Quality of Care through Litigation against Hospitals argues that courts could determine that a hospital’s failure to adopt a new technology to prevent the injury of patients could subject the hospital to liability for injury in cases in which it could be demonstrated that adoption of the technology would not have been prohibitively expensive and would probably have prevented the injury 6. Do physicians know when their diagnoses are correct? How likely are physicians to use diagnosis decision support systems? In 2005 Charles Friedman looked at the alignment between the confidence physicians had in their diagnosis [subjective] and the correctness of the diagnosis [obj
