Alice Tapper almost died in 2021 due to the misdiagnosis of her perforated appendix. Alice wrote her best selling book, Use Your Voice, to illustrate how caregivers and kids can advocate for themselves in a medical emergency and how important it is to make one’s voice heard, especially when others refuse to listen. The desire to prevent harm from diagnostic errors brought Alice and her family to Michigan in their mission to advocate for increased patient awareness and the ability to speak up.
Arriving at the correct diagnosis in a timely manner is fundamental to every interaction that the patient has with their healthcare provider. However, delays in diagnosis or worse, wrong diagnosis, leads to avoidable patient harm and approximately a trillion dollars in healthcare system costs.
Dr. Prashant Mahajan, Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Michigan, has studied diagnostic errors in emergency departments for two decades. In collaboration with the Tapper family, he is developing innovative and radical solutions to reduce diagnostic errors in children. His proposal for the Center for Diagnostic Excellence at the University of Michigan will aim to reduce patient harm from misdiagnosis by designing, testing and implementing interventions co-created by patients and healthcare providers who are empowered to “Use Your Voice”. The Center will leverage novel technologies, including artificial intelligence, to achieve its goals.
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