Critical Care Physician Assistant Bridgeport Hospital Yale-New Haven Health System
Many patients admitted to the ICU have a clear diagnosis, but for others, the consequences are clear (shock, respiratory failure, coma), but the cause is not. Unfortunately, many such cases are never definitively diagnosed, which creates obstacles to targeted therapeutics, accurate prognostication, and shared decision-making. We discuss the challenges to diagnosing the undifferentiated ICU patient, reflect on the cognitive errors and biases that contribute to the problem, review the data available on occult and missed diagnoses, and offer a practical approach to improve diagnostic acumen in the challenging patient.
