Research | Diagnostic Excellence
Advancing Diagnostic Safety Through Innovation, Research & Partnership
At the Center for Diagnostic Excellence, we’re turning research into real-world impact. Our work spans the development of cutting-edge tools, patient empowerment initiatives, and partnerships that drive cultural change across healthcare systems. By combining innovation, education, and collaboration, we aim to eliminate preventable harm from diagnostic errors and build a safer, more equitable future for all patients.
Current Projects & Pilot Studies
Learning from patients through storytelling - Our approach is to become the first organization to actively seek patient and family feedback to identify and understand diagnostic safety concerns and co-design solutions.
Defining Diagnostic Errors
- Developing a definition of diagnostic errors and conceptual framework for the diagnostic process in the ED: identify patient-level, provider/team-level, and systems-level contributory factors, and a scale to quantify harm from diagnostic errors in the ED
- Epidemiology of diagnostic errors in pediatric EDs: revealed that ~3% of triggered charts had diagnostic errors and ~50% of those children experienced harm
Communication for Diagnosis
- Framework development to study and improve communication for enhanced diagnostic quality in the ED: identified specific points in the ED where more attention to communication might be helpful and highlighted the role of specific types of communication for optimal outcomes
Innovative solutions using advanced methodology
- Combining clinical data with natural language processing of triage notes improves predictive accuracy for imaging use and appendicitis diagnosis pediatric emergency care.
Diagnostic Error Triggers
- Triggers to study frequency, contributory factors, and harm from diagnostic errors in the ED: development of multiple signals to comprehensively investigate the epidemiology of diagnostic errors in EDs
Co-Design Prevention Strategies
- Co-design ED-based diagnostic error prevention strategies: identified key needs of patients and providers and offered evidence-based design suggestions for improving diagnostic processes
Planning future initiatives
- Create a platform where the patients and providers and the systems can collaborate and communicate with each other in real time
- Assess whether Ambient Augmented Intelligence in Medicine electronic checklists reduce cognitive load, and improve acceptability, performance and adherence to protocols compared to traditional aids during simulated scenarios
- Translating emergency department notes into a format optimized for large language model processing, enabling more accurate prediction, retrieval, and reasoning for clinical decision support in emergency care
- Develop personalized digital health profiles by collecting daily physiological data and symptoms to support future individualized healthcare tools
Shaping the Future of Diagnosis
Whether you’re a clinician, researcher, patient advocate, or health-system leader, we welcome your ideas, insights, and partnership. Reducing diagnostic errors is a complex challenge—but together, we can create solutions that make a lasting difference.
