According to researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, MD, diagnostic mistakes are the most frequent, and most serious, medical error that occurs, and the one which leads to the most medical malpractice lawsuits.
There aren’t exact values as to how many patients are affected, but it‘s estimated that between 40,000 and 80,000 deaths happen in United States hospitals each year. Because of these high values, the Johns Hopkins researchers studied over 11,000 cases from a U.S. medical malpractice claims database to understand which conditions doctors are most likely to misdiagnose.