Diagnosing diagnostic failure.

Diagnostic failure results from misplaced dependence on the clinical judgments of expert physicians. The remedy for diagnostic failure involves defining standards of care for managing clinical information (medical knowledge and patient data), and implementing those standards with information tools designed for that purpose. These standards and tools are external to the minds of physicians, thus bypassing two inherent constraints on human cognition: limited capacities for information retrieval and processing, and innate heuristics and biases.