12 Million Americans Misdiagnosed Each Year: Study

A recent study shows how one in 20 adults are misdiagnosed in outpatient clinics throughout the United States.

"We've had this problem for a while," said Hardeep Singh, one of the researchers involved in the study, via Fox News. "We just haven't been able to measure it."

Researchers found that close to 12 million people nationwide pose a "substantial patient safety risk and that there should be renewed efforts to monitor and curb the number of misdiagnoses."

For the study, researchers used information from a sample of doctors' clinic visits and reviewed hundreds of medical records to determine whether patients were misdiagnosed.

Findings showed that 5.08 percent of American patients are misdiagnosed in outpatient settings every year, with at least 1 in 20 U.S. adults misdiagnosed every year.

Though some misdiagnoses may be relatively harmless, others could be potentially deadly. For instance, if a doctor were to misdiagnose a cough caused by lung cancer as that brought on by a cold, the cancer could have more of a chance to metastasize and be more difficult or impossible to treat.

"To date, patient safety improvements have largely focused on hospital stays and issues such as infections, falls, medication errors," researchers said, via a press release. "But most diagnoses are made in outpatient clinics where patients are looked after by several different healthcare teams and few safety concerns are ever reported."

Singh said the purpose of the study was to "to start a conversation with stronger methodology that might invite further research into the issue."

What do you think?

More information regarding the study can be found via BMJ Quality & Safety.