Multifactor Bias in Diagnosis and Treatment in the ED

Course overview

The ED is a pressurized environment created by time constraints, cognitive stressors, limited patient relationships, minimal clinical data, and a vast range of patient complaints and acuity, which all prime biases. However, despite these findings, often bias education is not currently embedded into emergency medicine training. Biases have been linked to altered clinical decision-making, misdiagnoses, medical errors, and potentially life-threatening and lethal outcomes (Zeidan et al., 2018). In this course, you will learn about biases in the ED from a pressurized environmental lens throughout the course. You will first be introduced to biases, then learn more about different contributing factors to the causes, dig deeper into the types of biases with relevant examples and their overarching negative systemic impact on the ED. Lastly, you'll learn about strategies to debias and "release that pressure valve" to help improve diagnostic and treatment outcomes for patients.