When you have a choice, which ED should you choose? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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When you look at the rates of missed diagnoses in various emergency departments, they’re lowest in academic medical centers. That’s according to the latest Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality study led by David Newman-Toker at Johns Hopkins.

Newman-Toker: If nothing else it tells us this problem is harder to solve than people may have initially given it credit for. This issue of disparate results in different places is an important one. We saw this same thing with diagnostic errors, where academic medical centers have lower rates of diagnostic errors than community or non-teaching places. In the medical literature that’s a pretty consistent theme. It’s not totally clear why that is, whether it’s for instance that there’s just more hands on, and more eyes and you’re sort of getting a lot of second opinions. Or whether it’s because there’s more access to technology and more intensive evaluation.  :34

Newman-Toker says the observation calls out for export of best practices nationally. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.