Disease Analysis Essay about a disease condition

The Diagnostic Process

This chapter provides an overview of diagnosis in health care. Include the committee’s conceptual model of the diagnostic process and a review of clinical reasoning. Diagnosis has important implications for patient care, research, and policy. Diagnosis has been described as both a process and a classification scheme, or a “pre-existing set of categories agreed upon by the medical profession to designate a specific condition” (Jutel, 2009).¹ When a diagnosis is accurate and made in a timely manner, a patient has the best opportunity for a positive health outcome because clinical decision making will be tailored to a correct understanding of the patient’s health problem. In addition, public policy decisions are often influence by diagnostic information, such as setting payment policies, resource allocation decisions, and research priorities.

The chapter describes important considerations in the diagnostic process, such as the roles of diagnostic uncertainty and time. It also highlights the mounting complexity of health care, due to the ever-increasing options for diagnostic testing² and treatment, the rapidly rising levels of biomedical and clinical evidence to inform clinical practice, and the frequent comorbidities among patients due to the aging of the population (IOM, 2008, 2013b).