A leading researcher studying medical errors, Dr. Kaveh Shojania, has joined the scientific staff of the Ottawa Health Research Institute (OHRI).
Dr. Shojania will be a scientist in the Clinical Epidemiology Program at the OHRI, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and a specialist in internal medicine at the Ottawa Hospital. He will work with Drs. Jeremy Grimshaw and Alan Forster, to establish a strong patient safety research program at OHRI.
In his own research, Dr. Shojania will focus on diagnostic errors. Though the subject of much informal discussion among physicians and frequently the subject of malpractice suits, diagnostic errors have received little formal study in terms of their frequency and causes.
“You start recognizing certain patterns of thought as consistently implicated in major diagnostic errors,” said Dr. Shojania. A common example he provided is the tendency to remain committed to an initial, seemingly obvious diagnosis and failing to take into account other symptoms.
After medical school in Canada, Dr. Shojania completed his training in internal medicine at Harvard University and a subsequent fellowship at the University of California in San Francisco, where he later took up a faculty position. In 2003, he co-authored Internal Bleeding, a startling book that documents and analyses the medical errors that are sometimes made in North American practice. Internal Bleeding has consistently maintained a position in the top 10 selling books on health in the U.S. since its release in February 2004.
