How Human Decision-making Biases Influence Health Outcomes in Patient Care

Abstract

Purpose: Medical treatments and medical decision making are mostly human based and therefore in risk of being influenced by cognitive biases. The potential impact could lead to bad medical outcome, unnecessary harm or even death. The aim of this comprehensive literature study is to analyse the evidence whether healthcare professionals are biased, which biases are most relevant in medicine and how these biases may be reduced.
 Approach/Findings: The results of the comprehensive literature based meta-analysis confirm on the one hand that several biases are relevant in the medical decision and treatment process. On the other hand, the study shows that the empirical evidence on the impact of cognitive biases on clinical outcome is scarce for most biases and that further research is necessary in this field.
 Value/Practical Implications: Nevertheless, it is important to determine the extent to which biases in healthcare professionals translate into negative clinical outcomes such as misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis, or mistreatment. Only this way, the importance of incorporating debiasing strategies into the clinical setting, and which biases to focus on, can be properly assessed.
 Research Limitations/Future Research: Though recent literature puts great emphasis on cognitive debiasing strategies, there are still very few approaches that have proven to be efficient. Due to the increasing degree of specialization in medicine, the relevance of the different biases varies.
 Paper type: Theoretical.

The Role of Mobile Applications in the Doctor’s Working Time Management System

“…Calculations of formula (1) showed that the efficiency of Group 2 compared to Group 1 is 23.80% higher, which in turn confirms the appropriateness of implementing and using medical mobile applications by physicians in outpatient appointments.…”

“…Research on the use of mobile applications in medicine and medical education is limited and closely related to the mobile health concept (mHealth). Maintaining a work-life balance for physicians requires learning to increase efficiency and effectively manage the limited resource of available time [1]. The physicians serve increasingly complex patients in less time, deal with more administrative paperwork, and are more easily accessible through e-mail, pagers, cell phones, and other technological tools, which contributes to high burnout rates [2].…”