Peer feedback, learning, and improvement: Answering the call of the Institute of Medicine report on diagnostic error

Summary

In September 2015, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued the report “Improving Diagnosis in Health Care,” which focused on the underappreciated problem of diagnostic error in medicine. This report builds on the IOM’s 2000 landmark report, “To Err is Human”, which specifically highlighted opportunities for improvement in diagnostically focused fields, such as radiology and pathology. One of the major recommendations of the report is that “health care organizations should adopt policies and practices that promote a nonpunitive culture that values open discussion and feedback on diagnostic performance”. Notably, the report emphasises the ineffectiveness of traditional approaches to evaluating medical error that focus on identifying individuals’ errors.

In this article published in Radiology, Larson and colleagues review the recommendations set forth by the recent IOM report, discuss the science and theory that underlie several of those recommendations, and assess how well they fit with the current dominant approach to peer review. They also offer an alternative approach to peer review: peer feedback, learning, and improvement (or more succinctly, “peer learning”), which they believe is better aligned with the principles promoted by the IOM.