ArticleAcademic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine2025
Using Video Ethnography and Stimulated Recall Interviews to Describe the Diagnostic Process in the Emergency Department.
Article in Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Self, Others and Context: Reframing Clinical Reasoning as a Socio-Cognitive Practice.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2026Review
- Using "Own-Point-of-View" Video and Stimulated Recall to Reveal Physician Thought Processes: A Methodology Paper.The western journal of emergency medicine · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesUnderstanding how physicians make diagnoses is challenging because cognitive processes are unobservable and partly unconscious, making it difficult for physicians to describe how they arrived at a diagnosis. Physicians who work in emergency departments (EDs) are especially vulnerable to making diagnostic errors because the ED is a fast-paced, dynamic setting where complex decision-making occurs under severe time, information, and resource constraints. The purpose of our study was to describe how the diagnostic process evolves for ED clinicians in both pediatric and adult ED settings.
methodsWe used a qualitative, video ethnography study design to capture in situ, real-time ED physician practice for 11 participants from February 2022 to July 2023. Participants wore a head-mounted video camera while providing care to ED patients, and in subsequent stimulated recall interviews, revealed their thinking throughout the diagnostic process.
resultsWe recorded 24.42 h of video overall (average 2.22 h per participant). We identified four major themes in the ED diagnostic process: (1) quality communication facilitates information flow, (2) cognition is complex and distributed across patients and the ED team, (3) artifacts can enhance the diagnostic process, and (4) there is a need to balance efficiency with safety and accuracy.
conclusionsIllustrating physicians' cognitive processes through video ethnography coupled with stimulated recall interviews helped advance our understanding of the diagnostic process and is a foundational step for identifying improvement opportunities.
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