Premature Closure: a type of cognitive error in which the physician/healthcare team fails to consider reasonable alternatives after an initial diagnosis is made.

During our previous sessions, I was struck by the profound effect premature closure has had on the lives of the few personal stories we have heard. In the field of aviation, confirmation bias, or looking for what you think you should see, has caused multiple crashes and near misses. All around, confirmation bias and premature closure are such risky mindsets.

I was reminded of Nassim Taleb’s theory. When you think of a typical swan, you probably think of a long-necked, white, elegant creature. From there, let’s say we theorize “all swans are white”. We could go to hundreds of different parks and ponds and lakes in America and find thousands of white swans to support our claim, but Taleb argues that is a form of confirmation bias,… Continue reading →

I woke up this morning to the chilly mountain air and sun streaking in the windows around 5:30 this morning, still saddened by the tragic shooting of police officers in Dallas yesterday and the death of Alton Sterling earlier this week. For those that we know of, there are many, many more victims of acts riddled with hate and misunderstanding and lack of communication that we never even hear about. Sadly, that discordance can occur in the medical field and within our treatment teams as well.

Yesterday was our first day of patient safety “boot camp” and we learned of multiple instances of hospital error, mainly due to lack of communication, clear leadership, and egos within the team that violated the Hippocratic oath of first doing no harm. For far, far to long, we have been letting trivial things get in the way of our number one goal: bringing healing… Continue reading →