Differential Diagnosis
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Overview and Purpose
Welcome to Differential Diagnosis for Emergency Medical Professionals! This course is designed to introduce you to differential diagnosis as it is one of the most challenging processes to learn, teach or practice. But if done correctly, it improves patient outcome, communication with patients and providers and assures continuity of care. It does not have to be complicated if you approach it with a straightforward process.
This course is designed for both the new EMT student as well as paramedic students looking to streamline and their assessment process. It is also helpful to instructors looking to introduce critical thinking into their lectures and skills practices. It is not meant to learn patient presentations, but rather the critical thinking involved in organizing and prioritizing the causes.
Needs Assessment
The Educational Problem and Opportunity
Differential diagnosis is the process of identifying the etiology of a disease through systematic assessment of patient history and physical examination (Cook, 2020). It is one of the most challenging process for medical professionals to learn, teach or practice, but done correctly, it improves patient outcome, communication with all stakeholders and assures continuity of care.
The Learners/Participants
EMT students early in the educational program, after anatomy/physiology and at the beginning of pathophysiology. EMT students are the initial audience but because of the focus on process rather than medicine, this class is scalable to any level of medical provider. This course is also relevant for paramedic students looking to improve their assessment process as well as EMS instructors looking to introduce critical thinking into their lessons.
Existing Efforts to Address this Gap
There are limited formal efforts to teach differential diagnosis. Emergency medicine education at the EMT or paramedic level has very strict topic and time requirements. Differential diagnosis education involves teaching physiology and pathophysiology, metacognition, conceptual change, concept mapping and critical thinking. Those are topics not tested for national registration certification and often seen as not as important as testable topics. Each of the thought processes in differential diagnosis may be taught, but not as one cohesive process.
One group attempting to teach differential diagnosis to nurse practitioner students developed a differential concept map to help students learn differential diagnosis and develop a plan of care (Reinoso, 2018). Another group suggests teaching critical thinking through the introduction of scenarios into the lecture which encourages differential diagnosis and the development of a treatment plan (Montoya, 2021).
Intent Statement
This course will help students understand differential diagnosis by introducing the concept and encouraging them to build their own differential diagnosis concept maps.
Performance Objectives
At the conclusion of the course learners will be able to:
· Define differential diagnosis
· Build concept maps for the purpose of organizing patient presentations and potential causes
· Generate list of differentials for an example patient presentation
· Understand systematic approach to differential diagnosis and integrate patient assessment
Course Units
This mini-course includes the following units. Click the title of a unit to go to its page.
Unit 1: Introduction to differential diagnosis and concept mapping
· Define differential diagnosis
· Understand the purpose of concept map
Students will build a blank concept map to begin to organize patient assessment data.
Unit 2: Differentials
Upon completing this unit, participants will be able to:
· Define differentials
· Brainstorm differentials for patient presentation
· Complete concept map
Unit 3: Differential diagnosis
Upon completing this unit, participants will be able to:
· Understand the use of patient assessment and diagnostic tools
· Begin differential diagnosis
Students will review patient assessment and use sample patient to integrate patient assessment data into concept map.
Extended Resources
Cook, C. E., & Décary, S. (2020). Higher order thinking about differential diagnosis. Brazilian journal of physical therapy, 24(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bjpt.2019.01.010
Montoya, L. (2021, September 7). Critical thinking scenarios in lecture. Limmer Education. https://limmereducation.com/article/critical-thinking-scenarios-in-lecture/
O'Leary, Z. (2007). The social science jargon buster. SAGE Publications Ltd, https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9780857020147
Reinoso, Bartlett, J. L., & Bennett, S. L. (2018). Teaching Differential Diagnosis to Nurse Practitioner Students. Journal for Nurse Practitioners, 14(10), e207–e212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nurpra.2018.08.028