Trusting the lab over the patient is the new medical error

The lab says the potassium is critically low. You walk in, and the patient looks completely fine. Duane Penshorn is an emergency physician and author. This episode is based on his article "Automation bias is the new medical error," published on KevinMD. He explains that automation bias got its name from studies of airline pilots, who had seen an alert be correct so many times that they stopped checking whether this one was. You will hear why point-of-care machines never answer "I don't know," and why most errors trace to how the sample was handled rather than to the machine. One clumped platelet count sent a child to the hospital for nothing. He is direct about the fix. If the number does not fit the patient in front of you, order it again, and say so out loud to the radiologist when the scan does not fit either. If you have ever scanned a result for the red flags and moved on, this conversation will make you look twice.

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