Time-ordered comorbidity correlations identify patients at risk of mis- and overdiagnosis.
Jørgensen IF, Brunak S. NPJ Digital Med. 2021;4(1):12.
Overdiagnosis is a growing area of concern within patient safety. The authors present a generalizable approach for identifying patients at risk of being mis- or overdiagnosed. Using chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients as an example, the authors outline how to create significant, temporal disease trajectories, and compare similarities between these disease trajectories and individual patient disease histories to identify the cases that may signal overdiagnosis.