Triage Language Might Delay Correct Diagnosis

Many unconscious biases affect clinicians' decision making, sometimes leading to overlooked diagnoses and delayed treatments. U.S. Veterans Affairs (VA) researchers wondered if unconscious bias might interfere with timely diagnosis of pulmonary embolism (PE) in the emergency department (ED).

The investigators examined the ED records of 100,000 patients with previous diagnoses of congestive heart failure (CHF) who came to a VA hospital between 2011 and 2018 with complaints of dyspnea. During a small fraction of these visits, the phrase “CHF” was specified by triage personnel in the written presenting complaint relayed to the clinician, along with mention of shortness of breath (SOB). Although these few thousand patients proved to have the sam…