Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association recently found truth in the old adage, “two heads are better than one” when it comes to finding the correct medical diagnosis.
To determine if two brains were better than one at solving diagnostic problems, researchers divided 88 fourth-year medical students into two groups. The first group of 28 individuals worked individually, while the remaining 60 were divided into 30 pairs. Although it may not be the most cost effective method in the short term, researchers noted that the group working in pairs arrived at the correct diagnosis 18 percent more often than those students who worked by themselves.
“Collaboration may have helped correct errors, fill knowledge gaps, and counteract reasoning flaws,” the authors wrote.
Partnering up appears to have significant benefits for students who are still in the early stages of their medical career. Additionally, pairing up helps students communicate with other practitioners, another necessary skill in the healthcare industry.
The study shows “how important it is to ensure that, in addition to making sure medical students have knowledge of how to make medical diagnoses appropriately, they also have skills at the ready to communicate with each other and function as high-quality teams,” said Amy Starmer, MD, a lecturer in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. “We need to be providing students and trainees the skills to collaborate. It’s an area that historically hasn’t received that much focus.”
Julieanne Kämmer, who lead the study, said research has shown that 15 percent of medical errors are of the diagnostic variety, and they wanted to see if partnering up could reduce those errors.
“We wanted to see how collaboration could be one measure to reduce diagnostic errors; whether working in a team can improve diagnostic decision-making.”
How it Worked
To test their hypothesis, researchers portrayed six different types of respiratory issues in a short video clip. The conditions shown were pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, intoxication, pulmonary edema, pulmonary artery embolism, and unstable ventricular tachycardia. After viewing the conditions, participants were asked to check any number of 30 diagnostic tests on a computer screen. The computer would then feed them the results of the sample test, and the students were tasked with interpreting the results on their own. Finally, students were asked to select one of 20 potential diagnoses.
After complying the data, researchers found:
- Pairs made the correct diagnosis 67.78 percent of the time, compared to 50 percent for the individual group, a 17.78 percent difference.
- Pairs needed longer to make a diagnosis, 2:02 minutes longer to be exact, but the tests they called for took 6:15 minutes less than the tests ordered by the individuals.
- Pairs were more confident in their diagnosis than their individual counterparts.
Kämmer concluded by saying that the study shows strong evidence that students should spend some time working collaboratively during residency training.
“This is everyday life later in hospitals. Maybe it’s right to train, and become aware of the benefits of group decision-making, to become more open to other information in a team,” she said. “Our hope would be, this changes your way of thinking about diagnosing, so that you more often question yourself and look at the information you get.”
Related source: MedPage Today