United States: Hospitals may be frequently misdiagnosing pneumonia ultimately leads to incorrect treatments which actually puts patients at risk of serious illness, a new study finds.
As reported by HealthDay, researchers and the health experts report that more than almost half the time, a pneumonia diagnosis changes after patients are admitted to the hospital.
This means that some patients who have been diagnosed with pneumonia may actually have a different illness, or pneumonia may have been missed entirely when they first arrived. Dr. Barbara Jones who is a pulmonary and critical care physician at the University of Utah Health, explained that pneumonia can be really very difficult to diagnose or treated because its symptoms often overlap with other conditions
Widespread Impact Across VA Medical Centers
The research has been analysed for at least 100 VA medical centres across the country and more than at least more than 10 % of the pneumonia hospitalizations involved a pneumonia diagnosis.
Pneumonia is an infection in one or both lungs that causes the air sacs to fill the fluid or pus, National institute on Health says it can be caused by bacterial viral or fungal infections.
Here the researchers found that a third of the patients who were ultimately diagnose with the pneumonia were not diagnosed with the conditions when they entered the hospital.
At the same specific time it’s almost nearly 40% of the people initially treated with pneumonia actually sick with something else and their diagnosis was revised during treatment.
Diagnosis Uncertainty and Patient Outcomes
The uncertainty was often evident in the doctors’ results show.
More than half the time 58 percent of the notes on the pneumonia diagnoses in the ER expressed uncertainty and likewise the notes on the diagnosis at the time of the discharge expressed uncertainty about the half the time 48%.
However, the people tended to receive more treatments with an initial diagnosis of the pneumonia that wound up being something else and researchers found however in general they didn’t do worse than the other patients.
But the patients with pneumonia missed from the start tended to have like very worse outcomes even if the condition was finally detected said the researchers.
“Both patients and clinicians need to pay attention to their recovery and question the diagnosis if they don’t get better with treatment,” Jones said in a university news release.