As part of his consulting work in malpractice litigation, Dr. Stark has developed an expertise in the analysis of medical errors — the patterns, root causes, and possible solutions. He recently gave Medical Grand Rounds for the Department of Internal Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School. His talk was entitled: Medical Errors: How and Why Good Doctors Make Bad Mistakes, and can be viewed here. In it he discusses types of errors, as they have been defined in the writings of clinical psychologists over the last several decades. They include confirmation bias, where people’s decisions are governed by their prior beliefs; the fallacy of logic, wherein things that logically should be true are not necessarily so; and the disregard of uncertainty, wherein people act out of a fear of doing nothing but where they have inadequate data for decision making.
Dr. Stark has been invited to give this talk at other institutions as well and will post updates in his blog about new development in this field.