No relevant relationships with ineligible companies to disclose within the past 24 months.
Cognitive bias is pervasive in clinical practice and is implicated in hundreds of thousands of medical errors in the U.S. annually. Cognitive biases, or heuristics, are mental shortcuts that impact medical decision-making. This presentation is designed to help PAs reduce misdiagnosis by recognizing and limiting the effects of cognitive errors in clinical practice. Attendees will learn about the errors our minds make when evaluating patients, analyze how errors may have contributed to problems in past cases, discover methods to decrease cognitive error and misdiagnosis in our practice, and apply this knowledge and skill to future encounters. In both the main presentation and interactive case reviews, attendees will identify cognitive contributors to misdiagnosis and form an appropriate preventive response for use in future patient care.
Learning Objectives:
At the conclusion of this session, participants should be able to:
Define cognitive bias
Identify common examples of cognitive bias in medical decision-making for choosing and validating diagnoses
Describe metacognition strategies to prevent misdiagnosis
Apply cognitive bias recognition and prevention strategies in cases
