Teaching critical thinking: A case for instruction in cognitive biases to reduce diagnostic errors and improve patient safety (February 2019)

Summary

By understanding how physicians make clinical decisions, and examining how errors due to cognitive biases occur, cognitive bias awareness training and debiasing strategies may be developed to decrease diagnostic errors and patient harm. Studies of the impact of teaching critical thinking skills have mixed results but are limited by methodological problems.

The authors of this paper, published in Academic Medicine, argue that explicit instruction in metacognition in medical education, including awareness of cognitive biases, has the potential to reduce diagnostic errors and thus improve patient safety.