Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence

The Center for Diagnostic Excellence, the first such Center focused exclusively on improving diagnostic safety and quality, was established in 2016 in recognition of the urgent need to address diagnostic errors. The Center's mission is to innovate to achieve diagnostic excellence and accountability for Johns Hopkins, the region, and the world by eliminating preventable harms from diagnostic errors, optimizing patient outcomes and experience in diagnosis, and reducing waste in diagnostic assessment. To this end, the Center’s long-range goals include (1) catalyzing efforts to improve diagnostic performance by raising awareness, engaging partners, prioritizing problems, implementing solutions, and measuring the impact of new diagnostic strategies; (2) developing the science of diagnostic safety by creating novel methods, metrics, and tools to improve diagnosis; and (3) enhancing diagnostic research by building training capacity, organizing collaborative networks, and influencing funding policy. The Center is housed within the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. The Armstrong Institute’s mission is to partner with patients and their loved ones to end preventable harm and continuously improve patient outcomes with a vision of saving lives by leading the world in patient safety and quality care. The Center includes a transdisciplinary team of physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, scientists, and staff members from the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center campuses. The Center’s achievements to date include building a community of patients and nurses trained to engage in diagnostic excellence research, creating novel diagnostic performance outcome measures, and developing innovative device-based bedside decision support tools to reduce stroke misdiagnosis in the emergency department.