The proposed scoping review will be conducted in accordance with the JBI methodology for scoping reviews [5, 6] and reported based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses extension for scoping review (PRISMA-ScR) [10]. A populated checklist for scoping review protocols recommended by Peters et al. [5] are available in Additional file 1.

Protocol and registration

The project is registered at Open Science Framework (OSF) with ID: osf.io/kv2n6.

Eligibility criteriaParticipants

The patients included will be adults and children seeking diagnostic care for a physical health issues.

We will exclude studies examining the diagnostic process of mental, behavioural, or neurodevelopmental disorders as there is a rather sharp division in both organisation and mode of action between the two sections of the health care system in most countries. However, there seems to be an increasing interest in IDMT in the field of mental health disorders, which makes this an obvious subject for another scoping review.

Concept

The concept examined by this scoping review consists of IDMT in relation to prevention of diagnostic errors and achieving diagnostic excellence. Studies of all aspects of the diagnostic process will be considered.

This scoping review will consider inclusion of studies that involve patients, relatives, doctors, biomedical laboratory scientists, nurses, radiographers, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, medical librarians, or information scientists in the IDMT. Any combination of these groups is of interest, but an IDMT must consist of at least two professions.

Context

This scoping review will include studies of the diagnostic process in the healthcare system.

Studies examining the diagnostic process in psychiatry, odontology, or complementary medicine will be excluded, due to the geographical distances and organizational differences.

Types of evidence sources

This scoping review will consider both experimental and quasi-experimental study designs including randomized controlled trials, non-randomized controlled trials, and before and after studies. In addition, analytical observational studies including prospective and retrospective cohort studies, case–control studies, and analytical cross-sectional studies will be considered for inclusion. This review will also consider descriptive observational study designs including case series and descriptive cross-sectional studies for inclusion.

Qualitative studies focusing on qualitative data including, but not limited to, designs such as phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, qualitative description, and action research will also be considered for the scoping review.

To identify and map all the types of available and emerging evidence in this field, text, opinion papers, websites, guidelines, policy documents and letters to editors will be identified and considered for inclusion by ultimo 2023/primo 2024, after the systematic literature process.

Search strategy

The search strategy will aim to locate both published and unpublished studies. A three-step search strategy will be utilized in this review. First, an initial limited search of EMBASE and EBSCO across the databases has been undertaken to identify articles on this topic, followed by an analysis of the text words contained in the titles and abstracts, and of the index terms used to describe these articles. This will inform the development of a search strategy including identified keywords and index terms, which will be tailored for each database. The bibliographic databases will be systematically searched using block search with the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT. A preliminary search strategy for EMBASE is detailed in Additional file 2.

We will search the databases: EMBASE, PubMed, CINAHL, Academic Search Premier, SCOPUS and Web of Science.

Unpublished studies from 1985 to the present date will be searched in OpenGrey and Google Scholar.

Text, opinion papers, websites, guidelines, policy documents and letters to editors will be searched across the websites of relevant institutions and organizations with an interest in patient safety, diagnosis and interprofessional teamwork.

Ongoing studies will be searched in the databases: NHS Research Register, Clinicaltrials.gov and OSF Registries for the last 5 years.

To ensure literature saturation, reference lists of included articles will be manually screened to identify additional studies. A systematic citation search will be performed to collect all articles that cite the original papers.

Studies published from 1985 to the present date will be included as the preliminary search revealed that the publication rate of literature concerning patient safety increased dramatically at this point.

All languages are accepted in the searches. Studies published in English, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish will be included directly and studies in other languages will be translated, if considered relevant for inclusion in the scoping review.

The bibliographic databases will be searched again toward the end of the review process to ensure that the most recent studies are included.

Study/source of evidence selection

Citations, abstracts, and full-text articles retrieved through the literature search will be uploaded to Covidence, an Internet-based bibliographic management software program operated by Veritas Health Innovation Ltd., Melbourne, Australia. Removal of duplicates and the screening process will be managed in Covidence based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. To optimize and qualify the screening process, a calibration exercise, in which 50 titles and abstracts are read, discussed and assessed in agreement by the two authors (NLH & LNJ) responsible for screening, will be undertaken prior to the screening.

The selection process will be performed in two steps: first, screening by titles and abstracts, and second, screening of full text of reports selected by the first step. Both steps will be performed according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria and done independently by two authors (NLH & LNJ). Reasons for exclusion will be recorded and reported in the scoping review. Any disagreements that arise between the reviewers at each stage of the selection process will be resolved through discussion, or with additional reviewer or reviewers. The results of the search and the study inclusion process will be reported in full in the final scoping review and presented in a PRISMA-ScR flow diagram [6, 13].

Data extraction/data charting

Data from eligible studies or other evidence sources will be extracted using a data extraction form designed for this study. The data extraction form will be designed using Covidence, and will include information on key study characteristics, e.g., title, authors, reference/source/year of publication, country, aim of study, setting, study design, sources of funding/competing interest; and specific details on all methods and metrics used, e.g., population, concept, context; study methods of significance to the review question; and specific objectives. The data extraction form will continuously be discussed and revised in an iterative process between reviewers throughout the data charting. A draft extraction form is provided in this protocol (see Additional file 3).

Two reviewers (NLH & LNJ) will independently extract and chart the data, followed by cross-checking and discussion of the results and continuous revision of the data extraction form in an iterative process. Any disagreement between the two reviewers will be resolved through discussion between all four co-authors. If necessary and appropriate, the authors of eligible studies will be contacted to request missing or additional data.

Data analysis and presentation

The extracted data will be analysed in a qualitative synthesis and presented in diagrammatic or tabular form in a manner that aligns to the objective and scope of this scoping review. The tables and charts will report distribution of studies by year or period of publication, countries of origin, area of practice, research methods, and results. In the mapping of evidence, we will clearly indicate whether the evidence origins from published or unpublished studies, to check the effect of unpublished studies on the results. A narrative summary will accompany the tabulated and/or charted results and will describe how the results relate to the review’s objective and questions.

Potential deviations from this protocol

Deviations from this protocol will be clearly mentioned in the review manuscript.