Nadia Bennett
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Intern Med
Medical diagnosis is a cornerstone of general internal medicine. In order to accurately diagnose a condition and help refine a differential diagnosis, physicians and health care providers routinely use mental heuristics and clinical reasoning cues. Several factors can limit a provider�s ability to accurately diagnose a condition or reason through a diagnosis systematically. This is especially true for less experienced providers and physicians in training. It is therefore important for health care providers to understand basic principles of clinical reasoning and develop tools to teach their learners how to avoid common diagnostic errors. In this session, we will discuss medical heuristics, basic principles and diagnostic theory that serve as a foundation for clinical reasoning. We will then provide the participants with practical tools and a stepwise approach that will enable them to teach their learners how to avoid common diagnostic errors. The objectives of the study are to review the key models used to conceptualize clinical reasoning, understand the major cognitive biases and how they can contribute to diagnostic error, utilize a framework to identify learners with clinical reasoning deficits and discuss strategies to help learners with clinical reasoning deficits.
Email: nadia.bennett@uphs.upenn.edu