UCSF Leads Development of Library of Tools for Diagnostic Performance Feedback
Led by faculty and staff at the University of California San Francisco, GoodDx.org has been launched as a one-stop collection of resources and tools to empower healthcare organizations to measure diagnostic performance, provide feedback to diagnosticians, and improve diagnostic accuracy and timeliness.
Supported with a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, GoodDX.org was developed as a collaboration between healthcare leaders from across the country to help health systems identify implementable tools that facilitate providing feedback about diagnostic performance to their clinicians.
The Moore Foundation’s Diagnostic Excellence Initiative addresses the need to improve diagnostic performance, reduce costs and redundancy in the diagnostic process, improve health outcomes and save lives.
GoodDX.org, its creators say, is akin to an online library maintained as a public good, and free to use and explore (although some of the resources listed within it are from commercial entities with fees to purchase). GoodDx.org says it relies on a thriving user community to offer feedback about implementation experiences with the resources listed, and to submit new resources for consideration as they are developed.
Their goal is to build a community of healthcare leaders who share a common drive: to improve diagnostic performance with feedback. We welcome input and feedback through the Contact link at the bottom of the page.
The organizers note that providing diagnostic performance feedback to clinicians is a multi-step process that begins with identifying potential diagnostic encounters and ends with returning diagnostic performance results to the clinician, with a number of steps in between. All the resources they have identified fulfill at least one of these steps, but some resources fulfill more than others. A table view shows the end-to-end completeness of each resource in this multi-step process.
In a video on the organization’s website, clinicians and researchers discuss briefly why this effort is so important. Among the efforts leaders is Benjamin I. Rosner, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of medicine in UCSF’s Division of Hospital Medicine and Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research. “Feedback is the process by which we learn and improve. Without that feedback, we can't get better at doing what we each need to do,” he said.
“Anytime I can be a better doctor tomorrow than the one I am today, then I owe it to all my patients to do that. And feedback is one of the most tangible ways to achieve that goal,” said Gurpreet Dhaliwal, M.D., a professor of medicine at UCSF.
“Feedback loops are essential. They're everywhere in health systems. Feedback about diagnosis is especially important because it gets at both risk of harm and preventing that as well as opportunity to provide better care,” said Zachary Landis-Lewis, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Learning Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School.
