Posted: March 28th, 2021

Healthcare Issue Essay Assignment

Healthcare Issue
Quality of care is a national healthcare issue that is affecting patients with various diseases. One of the causes of poor quality of care is misdiagnosis which occurs as a result of poor technology or medical malpractice (Newman-Toker et al., 2019). Statistics indicate that approximately 12 million patients are misdiagnosed annually in the United States (Zhang et al., 2017). For example, a medical practitioner may diagnose a patient with gastric problems whereas the patient is suffering from a heart attack. The poor quality of care leads to death or adverse effects.
The effect of misdiagnosis on the work settings include an increased number of lawsuits due to malpractice. Healthcare providers are sued under the medical negligence for exposing patients to adverse effects which they could have prevented (Zhang et al., 2017). A patient may end up spending millions of cash for the wrong medical condition. The lawsuits can prompt medical experts to quit their jobs, which demoralizes the remaining professionals. It can also lower the expectations of the patients due to the high death rate due to misdiagnosis (Desai & Dave, 2017). The issue can also lead to loss of revenue since the hospital will create a poor reputation in the public. Therefore, misdiagnosis has severe effects on the workplace settings which further complicates provision of healthcare services.
The healthcare facility has responded by adopting technology to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. For example, they have adopted artificial intelligence systems to boost in-depth diagnosis of patients (Desai & Dave, 2017). Artificial intelligence is effective in diagnosis of breast, cervical and skin cancer. It has also responded by increasing the skills of healthcare providers to reduce cases of medical malpractice (Zhang et al., 2017). The specific changes include the adoption of artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy of diagnosis.
References
Desai, V., & Dave, D. (2017). Is artificial intelligence better than manual methods in diagnosis of electrocardiograms (ECGs) or not? International Journal of Advances in Medicine, 4(5), 1463.
Newman-Toker, D. E., Schaffer, A. C., Yu-Moe, C. W., Nassery, N., Tehrani, A. S. S., Clemens, G. D., … & Siegal, D. (2019). Serious misdiagnosis-related harms in malpractice claims: The “Big Three”–vascular events, infections, and cancers. Diagnosis, 6(3), 227-240.
Zhang, J., Song, Y., Xia, F., Zhu, C., Zhang, Y., Song, W., … & Ma, X. (2017). Rapid and accurate intraoperative pathological diagnosis by artificial intelligence with deep learning technology. Medical Hypotheses, 107, 98-99.