A national cohort study representing more than 2 million patient encounters found that more than half of all patients hospitalized and treated for pneumonia experienced discordant diagnoses from initial presentation to discharge. The research highlights a significant prevalence of treatment for other diagnoses and frequent expressions of diagnostic uncertainty, underscoring the critical need for recognizing and addressing diagnostic uncertainty in pneumonia-related care practices. The authors suggest that these findings call for enhanced attention to the diagnostic process and research that acknowledges uncertainty to improve patient outcomes in pneumonia treatment.
This is important because pneumonia is the leading cause of death from infection. The study is published in Annals of Internal Medicine . Researchers from the University of Utah and Salt Lake City VA Healthcare System used administrative data and natural language processing to study the accuracy of pneumonia diagnoses among over 2 million admissions to Veterans Administration hospitals between 2015 and 2022.
To explore the change in a pneumonia diagnosis across a hospitalization, the researchers classified each hospitalization according to concordance or discordance in pneumonia diagnoses between three states: initial diagnosis made in the ED, initial chest image reports, and discharge. They then measured the concordance of the admission diagnosis of pneumonia, a radiographic finding consistent with pneumonia, and.