Medical Decision Making Performance in Dual-task Scenarios

Abstract

Physicians often perform multiple tasks concurrently, such as diagnosing a disease while talking with another physician about other patients. However, little experimental evidence is available to determine whether a concurrent task affects the quality and timely performance of diagnostic decisions. In this study, we employed a representative medical diagnostic task to examine the effects of concurrent tasks on diagnostic decision making, in which potential confounding factors are controlled to allow the quantification of diagnostic performance and strategies. The results showed that diagnostic performance was negatively affected by a complex concurrent memorization task that required participants to listen to verbal updates and remember information about other patients while performing the diagnostic task. In contrast, a simple concurrent sound monitoring task did not affect diagnostic performance. Participants used the same diagnostic strategies in the single- and dual-task conditions. These findings provide new insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying medical diagnostic decision and physician multitasking. Implications for the improvement of healthcare quality are discussed.