Xifin Inc, San Diego, has reached an agreement with QualityStar, Omaha, Neb, to market its cloud-based case review service to help reduce interpretive diagnostic errors and improve patient care.
Xifin will offer QualityStar’s anatomic pathology case review service as an app on the Xifin ProNet online physician collaboration portal, available on the company’s Health Economics Optimization platform. The partnership will make possible confidential, HIPAA-compliant and secure exchange of cases for quality assurance (QA) review by QualityStar’s network of cancer centers and subspecialty pathologists.
Chrystal Adams, Xifin.
“Offering our anatomic pathology customers convenient access to QA services advances our ability to provide the cloud-based exchange of images and case data needed to support collaboration and reduce misdiagnosis to improve clinical quality and economic performance,” says Chrystal Adams, associate vice president of product line management at Xifin.
Cases of delayed, missed, and incorrect patient diagnosis are a growing concern among anatomic pathologists. In the United States, the rate of diagnostic error is estimated to be between 10% and 20% of all cases, accounting for 40,000 to 80,000 deaths per year.1 Research by researchers at Johns Hopkins University indicates that over the past 25 years of malpractice claims studied, diagnostic errors accounted for nearly 29% of insurance claims, at a cost of almost $40 billion.2 Second opinions are often suggested as a potential intervention to reduce misdiagnosis, estimated in some studies to change diagnosis 15% of the time and treatment 37%.3
Monique Spence, QualityStar.
“The College of American Pathology (CAP)/Association of Directors of Anatomic and Surgical Pathology expert panel findings on target case reviews report a median 18% discrepancy rate, and a 6.3% major discrepancy rate for surgical pathology diagnosis,” says Monique Spence, president of QualityStar. “We believe our collaboration with Xifin will help bring a significant improvement in the quality of diagnostics by enabling implementation of the new CAP guidelines for QA to help reduce interpretive diagnostic errors.”
For more information, visit Xifin or QualityStar.
REFERENCES
- Graber ML, Wachter RM, Cassel CK. Bringing diagnosis into the quality and safety equations. JAMA. 2012;308(12):1211–1212; doi: 10.1001/2012.jama.11913.
- Tehrani AS, Lee H, Mathews SC. Twenty-five-year summary of US malpractice claims for diagnostic errors 1986–2010: an analysis from the National Practitioner Data Bank. BMJ Qual Safe. 2013;22(8):672–680; doi: 10.1136/bmjqs-2012-001550.
- Landro L. A medical detective story: why doctors make diagnostic errors. Wall Street Journal. September 26, 2015. Available at: www.wsj.com/articles/a-medical-detective-story-why-doctors-make-diagnostic-errors-1443295859. Accessed December 16, 2015.
