Pending Hospital Test Results Often Ignored
Posted on: Sunday, 18 September 2005, 03:00 CDT
Don't leave the hospital without asking whether all your test results are in. That's the bottom line of a study published last month in Annals of Internal Medicine. Often, test results pending at time of discharge would have altered ongoing treatment recommendations.
The study looked at the care of 2,644 patients discharged from two unnamed academic hospitals between February and June of 2004. It was conducted by Christopher L. Roy, MD, and colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. T hey found that almost half of the discharged patients had pending laboratory and radiologic test results. And 9% of these results would have changed their diagnostic or treatment plan. This study drew its findings from the electronic database shared by the two academic hospitals.
Urgent Action Sometimes Needed
Dr. Roy and colleagues provided some examples that required urgent action on the part of the physicians. One patient was discharged with a levofloxacin prescription for a urinary tract infection; whereas the urine culture showed a high level of bacteria resistant to that particular antibiotic. Another patient with a duodenal ulcer, was discharged without an antibiotic prescription, and found to have a urine culture that showed one was necessary. In yet another example, a patient treated for rapid heart beat was later found to have a thyroid-stimulating hormone level consistent with a new diagnosis of hyperthyroidism.
Dr. Roy and colleagues wrote, "Failure to follow up on certain results (for example, the results of blood cultures) could have catastrophic consequences, but even results that do not require urgent action (such as discovery of a pulmonary nodule or iron deficiency) could have important consequences if overlooked."
This study was sponsored by the Harvard Risk Management Foundation and published in a special section of Annals of Internal Medicine called "Improving Patient Care," supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Copyright Center for Medical Consumers Aug 2005
Source: HealthFacts
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