Patient Reasoning: Patients’ and Care Partners’ Perceptions of Diagnostic Accuracy in Emergency Care

Objectives In the context of validating a measure of patient report specific to diagnostic accuracy in emergency department or urgent care, this study investigates patients’ and care partners’ perceptions of diagnoses as accurate and explores variations in how they reason while they assess accuracy. Methods In February 2022, we surveyed a national panel of adults who had an emergency department or urgent care visit in the past month to test a patient-reported measure. As part of the survey validation, we asked for free-text responses about why the respondents indicated their (dis)agreement with 2 statements comprising patient-reported diagnostic accuracy: 1) the explanation they received of the health problem was true and 2) the explanation described what to expect of the health problem. Those paired free-text responses were qualitatively analyzed according to themes created inductively. Results A total of 1,116 patients and care partners provided 982 responses coded into 10 themes, which were further grouped into 3 reasoning types. Almost one-third (32%) of respondents used only corroborative reasoning in assessing the accuracy of the health problem explanation (alignment of the explanation with either test results, patients’ subsequent health trajectory, their medical knowledge, symptoms, or another doctor’s opinion), 26% used only perception-based reasoning (perceptions of diagnostic process, uncertainty around the explanation received, or clinical team’s attitudes), and 27% used both types of reasoning. The remaining 15% used general beliefs or nonexplicated logic (used only about accurate diagnoses) and combinations of general reasoning with perception-based and corroborative. Conclusions Patients and care partners used multifaceted reasoning in their assessment of diagnostic accuracy. Implications As health care shifts toward meaningful diagnostic co-production and shared decision making, in-depth understanding of variations in patient reasoning and mental models informs use in clinical practice. Highlights An analysis of 982 responses examined how patients and care partners reason about the accuracy of diagnoses they received in emergency or urgent care. In reasoning, people used their perception of the process and whether the diagnosis matched other factual information they have. We introduce “patient reasoning†in the diagnostic measurement context as an area of further research to inform diagnostic shared decision making and co-production of health.