Red Flags in Primary Care - What to Do and When

Overview

Every day as a primary care clinician is different, and the specialty allows for a fascinating and robust patient population and varied chief complaints. In actuality, we see a couple dozen complaints commonly, and it remains easy to get lulled into a false sense of security and come to an erroneous diagnosis in common and every-day patient complaints. This presentation will address a handful of common primary care patient complaints, along with guideline-driven treatment, and the red flags that may be easily dismissed, resulting in a catastrophic outcome, focusing on premature closure and anchoring errors.

Learning Objectives

• Summarize common primary care presentations that pose the potential for a broad differential diagnosis, from benign to serious conditions
• Prioritize alternative differential diagnoses for each presentation, identifying those which must be reasonably ruled out during evaluation
• Implement focused history-taking, physical examination, and documentation strategies to support accurate diagnosis and mitigate risk in primary care