Saving Lives and Reducing Health Care Waste by Improving Diagnosis in Medicine Act

Key Points

• The bill treats diagnostic error, misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis, and missed diagnosis, as a major and preventable source of patient harm and wasted health care spending, and sets up new federal infrastructure to research and fix it.
• It creates a formal research and quality improvement program at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality focused specifically on understanding and eliminating diagnostic failures.
• New research centers around the country will connect academic medical centers and provider networks directly to real-world clinical practice to test fixes, including AI and data tools.
• A new voluntary reporting system will let patients and families report diagnostic errors and near misses, but these reports cannot be used as evidence in lawsuits and only serve learning purposes.
• The bill authorizes $45 million a year for research through 2031, $20 million a year for the reporting system through 2030, and $1.5 million a year for a new coordinating council through 2030.
• It establishes an Interagency Council on Improving Diagnosis, bringing together the CDC, CMS, VA, FDA, NIH institutes, and other agencies to coordinate diagnostic safety efforts and report back to Congress.