Study: Antibiotic overuse results from diagnostic errors

A new study released this week by the Minneapolis VA Medical Center found that diagnostic errors can lead to antibiotic overuse, according to Modern Healthcare. In most cases examined where a patient’s initial diagnosis was undetermined or later found to be wrong, the patient was given antibiotics he or she didn’t need, the study found.

As part of the study, a team of researchers evaluated 500 randomly chosen VA patients who received antibiotics from October 2007 to September 2008 and a group of physicians judged the accuracy of the initial diagnoses. The physicians reached different conclusions in more than a third of the cases, and in those cases, patients were more likely to have received unnecessary medications.

Read the Modern Healthcare article.