SIDM Awarded NASA Grant

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 25, 2016 - The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has awarded the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) a one-year, exploratory grant to study whether education and training on cognitive errors could improve decision-making on future space missions.

Decision-making on space flights is currently optimized by taking advantage of input from crew-members and mission control staff, but on long-duration exploratory missions, such as the planned mission to Mars, astronauts will be more reliant on their own decision-making skills. The lessons learned from studying the cognitive shortcomings that underlie diagnostic errors are highly relevant to the problems NASA astronauts will be facing, because these errors are common to decision-making in all fields.

###About the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM)
SIDM is a nonprofit organization whose members include clinicians and other healthcare professionals, patients and every stakeholder in the diagnostic process. In 2015, SIDM established the Coalition to Improve Diagnosis, a collaboration of more than 35 leading healthcare organizations. Visit www.improvediagnosis.org to learn more.