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Join the IDEAS Project To Advance Diagnostic Safety

Issue Number

966

ƵNews Now is a weekly newsletter that highlights agency research and program activities.

July 15, 2025

Today’s Headlines:

Diagnostic safety events are common and pervasive across all healthcare settings. Ƶrecently developed several resources, including Calibrate Dx, to help healthcare organizations improve diagnostic safety. Calibrate Dx provides clinicians with guidance for calibrating diagnostic performance for the purposes of learning and improvement. The AHRQ-funded Implementing Diagnostic Excellence Across Systems (IDEAS) project is recruiting groups of clinicians within healthcare organizations to use and evaluate Calibrate Dx. 

If clinicians in your organization are interested in lifelong learning strategies to improve diagnostic safety with added support and other benefits, visit the IDEAS website for Calibrate Dx. Enroll in the program by September 30.

Ƶhas launched a brief user survey, and we want to hear from you. Whether you use AHRQ’s  for quality improvement, benchmarking, reporting, or research, your insights are key to ensuring these tools remain relevant, effective, and impactful.

This is your opportunity to share how the Quality Indicators work for you and how they could work even better. Your feedback will help us make meaningful enhancements that support smarter, data-driven improvements across the healthcare system. Your experience matters. Thank you in advance for helping shape the next generation of Quality Indicators.

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Story building, technical expertise, and teamwork are among the most common clinical skills linked to diagnostic success in the emergency department (ED), according to a recent AHRQ-funded study in the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making. Unlike much existing research, the article examines aspects of diagnostic expertise rather than error. Researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 43 providers from diverse roles and hospital settings, eliciting a total of 60 diagnostically challenging incidents that occurred in an ED. Following multiple iterations of qualitative analysis, the study found that in 63 percent of cases, providers used story building—making sense of a patient’s symptoms by “connecting the dots” with a feasible narrative—to reach a correct diagnosis. Technical expertise contributed to 58 percent, and teamwork with other healthcare providers played a role in 55 percent of the incidents. Access the to learn more about these and other areas of diagnostic expertise.

Updated Guides Improve Safety and Usability of Electronic Health Records 

The Safety Assurance Factors for Electronic Health Record Resilience (SAFER) Guides help healthcare organizations routinely assess and improve their electronic health record systems and are a required annual attestation by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. A new AHRQ-funded study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, outlines updates to the 2025 guidelines that reflect current evidence and clinical practice. A multidisciplinary team of researchers implemented changes that include new guidance on artificial intelligence and medical device data, strategies to reduce clinician burden, and real-world implementation examples. The revised guidelines streamline content, reduce the number of recommended practices by 40 percent, and make it easier for healthcare teams to assess and improve electronic health record systems. Access the .

Algorithms Use Electronic Health Records To Track Penicillin Delabeling 

Because most patients with a documented penicillin allergy label do not have a true allergy, “delabeling” those who can safely take associated antibiotics can improve outcomes and slow the development of antimicrobial resistance. Funded with Ƶsupport, two novel algorithms described in Clinical Infectious Diseases have shown accuracy in tracking the prevalence of delabeling through electronic health records. While both performed equally well when compared against a human expert review, the simpler algorithm that does not require free-text or manual review achieved 100 percent sensitivity. The algorithms were tested using over 77,000 records at two Boston-based health systems and successfully found a 6.8 percent delabeling rate, highlighting the potential use of the simpler variant for quality improvement and for other projects, as well as the importance of further strategies to improve effective delabeling. Access the .

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Overall, 7.8 percent of U.S. adults aged 18 and older received heart disease treatment in 2022. Heart disease impacted 8.4 percent of men and 7.2 percent of women. (Source: ƵMedical Expenditure Panel Survey Statistical Brief #562, ).

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Trends in end-of-life care and satisfaction among veterans undergoing surgery. Dualeh SHA, Anderson MS, Abrahamse P, et al. Ann Surg 2025 Apr;281(4):682-88. Epub 2024 Feb 23. Access the  on PubMed®.

One hundred years of seeking respectful maternity care: History and evolution. Tilden EL, Jungbauer R, Hart EL, et al. Birth 2025 Mar;52(1):129-37. Epub 2024 Oct 16. Access the  on PubMed®.

Association of emergency department nurse and physician work environment agreement on clinician job and patient outcomes. Muir KJ, Agarwal AK, Golinelli D, et al. BMC Health Serv Res 2025 May 16;25(1):709. Access the  on PubMed®.

Prevention in adults of transmission of infection with multidrug-resistant organisms: an updated systematic review from Making Healthcare Safer IV. McCarthy S, Motala A, Shekelle PG. BMJ Qual Saf 2025 Mar 19;34(4):244-56. Access the  on PubMed®.

Better end-of-life care in surgical patients: Veterans Affairs Bereaved Family Survey - a qualitative analysis. Shabet C, Vitous CA, Evans E, et al. BMJ Support Palliat Care 2025 Feb 26;15(2):270-80. Access the  on PubMed®.

Neurodevelopmental and behavioural disorders after perioperative invasive mechanical ventilation in paediatric surgical admissions. Isik OG, Guo L, Ben-Ezra A, et al. Br J Anaesth 2025 May;134(5):1440-49. Access the  on PubMed®.

Shared medical appointments to improve equitable access to rehabilitative care for Long COVID. Cheng AL, DeFranco AR, Furman M, et al. Cardiopulm Phys Ther J 2025 Jan;36(1):50-7. Access the  on PubMed®.

Epidemiology and outcomes of antibiotic de-escalation in patients with suspected sepsis in US hospitals. Kam KQ, Chen T, Kadri SS, et al. Clin Infect Dis 2025 Feb 5;80(1):108-17. Access the  on PubMed®.

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Page last reviewed July 2025
Page originally created July 2025

Internet Citation: Join the IDEAS Project To Advance Diagnostic Safety. Content last reviewed July 2025. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD.
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