Cognitive Autopsy

Pat Croskerry, MD, PhD, is Professor of Emergency Medicine and in the Division of Medical Education & Continuing Professional Development, Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. In addition to his medical training, he holds a doctorate in Experimental Psychology and a Fellowship in Clinical Psychology. He has published over 90 journal articles and 40 book chapters in the area of patient safety, clinical decision making and medical education reform. Two of his papers are in the top 5 cited papers in the emergency medicine education literature. In 2006, he was appointed to the Board of the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, and in the same year received the Ruedy award from the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada for innovation in medical education. He has given over 500 keynote presentations at leading medical schools, hospitals, and universities around the world.

Recently, it has become clear that medical error is a leading cause of death, and one of the biggest problems occurs when doctors get the diagnosis wrong. Typically, patients may feel that their diagnosis was delayed or wrong because the doctor didn't know enough about their disease, but many studies now show that the problem is more likely to be a failure in how doctors think rather than in what they don't know. This book offers some insight into how doctors think. It identifies a number of biases in medical decision making that are largely responsible for diagnoses being delayed or missed.

Foreword