RESULTS
Diagnostic Errors : After the peer audit, 33 diagnostic errors
were identified in the 371 recorded cases (9.97%).
Use of heuristics: First, with respect to representativeness, the
first diagnostic impression (FDI) coincides with the confirmation
diagnosis (CD) in 183 of the cases (49.59%); in the other half of the
cases there is no such agreement. This result means that in almost half
of the cases the doctors use the representativeness heuristic in the
diagnostic decision process.
In the case of availability, the final or confirmation diagnosis
coincides with one of the differential diagnoses in 304 of the
registered cases, which represents 82.38%. In most cases, the physician
determined as a final diagnosis one of the three that appeared most
quickly in his mind (DD), being this concordance a sample of the use of
the availability heuristic.
Finally, in the overconfidence, in 54 of the cases (14.52%) the doctors
felt with a confidence in their diagnostic judgment below 50%. In 103
cases (27.69%) the confidence was between 50 and 70%. Finally, in 214
cases (57.80%) the doctors showed an above-average confidence in their
diagnostic judgment (more than 75.17%). This result shows that in more
than half of the cases the doctors showed above-average confidence.
(Fig.2)