Prometheus 6

Why Doctors So Often Get It Wrong opens in a way that startled me.

With all the tools available to modern medicine — the blood tests and M.R.I.'s and endoscopes — you might think that misdiagnosis has become a rare thing. But you would be wrong. Studies of autopsies have shown that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time. So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease.

Yow. And the follow-up was just as deep.

As shocking as that is, the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930's. "No improvement!" was how an article in the normally exclamation-free Journal of the American Medical Association summarized the situation.

This is the richest country in the world — one where one-seventh of the economy is devoted to health care — and yet misdiagnosis is killing thousands of Americans every year..

"[O]ne-seventh of the economy" is your clue on what this is about.

...though doctors can have the best intentions, they have little economic incentive to spend time double-checking their instincts, and hospitals have little incentive to give them the tools to do so.

There's talk in the article of paying for success and I can't imagine how that would work...you only pay for tests that find something? Then there was a description of a (computer) program to assist in diagnoses, which I assume is the point of the article. Maybe I'm cynical.