Page "Hindsight bias" Paragraph 21

Accidents are prone to happen in any human undertaking, but accidents occurring within the health care system seem more salient and severe due to their profound effect on the lives of those involved, sometimes resulting in the death of a patient.

Hindsight bias has been shown to be a disadvantage of nearly all methods of measuring error and adverse events within the healthcare system.

These methods include morbidity and mortality conferences and autopsy, case analysis, medical malpractice claims analysis, staff interviews and even patient observation.

Furthermore, studies of injury or death rates as a result of error and virtually all incident review procedures used in healthcare today fail to control for hindsight bias, severely limiting the generalizability and integrity of the research.

Physicians who are primed with a possible diagnosis before evaluating the symptoms of a patient themselves are more likely to arrive at the primed diagnosis than physicians who were only given the symptoms of the patient.

According to Harvard Medical Practice Studies, 44, 000 – 98, 000 deaths in the United States each year are a result of safety incidents within the healthcare system.

Many of these deaths are viewed to be preventable after the fact, clearly indicating the presence and importance of a hindsight bias in this field.