MONDAY, July 18, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- Many doctors don't follow up on test results pending for patients who have been released from a hospital, running the risk of missing some major medical problems, a new report contends.
At two American hospitals, the study authors found that doctors didn't know about 65 of 105 test results that came back after patients had been discharged. All the results suggested serious issues requiring action.
The percentage of missed results "is large enough that we're concerned about it and want to do something about it," said study co-author Dr. Christopher Roy, associate director of the hospitalist program at Brigham & Women's Hospital, in Boston.
The study findings appear in the July 19 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
The researchers examined the medical records of 2,644 patients at two hospitals from February through June 2004. The hospitals were not identified, but the researchers said they are both academic centers in Boston.
All of the patients were in the care of hospitalists, who are doctors based in hospitals. About 41 percent of the patients had test results due when they left the hospitals, Roy said.
Forty-three percent of the time, post-discharge test results were abnormal; in about 10 percent of cases they suggested serious problems requiring doctors to take action, according to the study.
The researchers surveyed the appropriate hospital doctors on 155 of the most worrisome tests. Many doctors failed to respond to the survey, but those who did provided information on what they recalled about 105 of the tests, according to the study.
More than 60 percent of the time, the responding doctors said they didn't know about the test results; one-third said they didn't even know the tests had been ordered, the study authors said.
Despite the findings, Roy said the "big picture" of patients is being transmitted to the primary-care physicians who pick up where the hospital doctors leave off. "But on occasion, a lab test or two may be overlooked. Over a year's time, this could be a patient safety issue," he said.
Why are some doctors failing to focus on the test results? The problem isn't the transmission of the results to the doctor, Roy said. Instead, it's making sure doctors pay attention when they're coping with "reams" of data on each patient, he said.
One possible remedy is to set up systems to electronically alert doctors when a potentially dangerous test result comes in. Doctors could use "a little bit more of a heads-up in terms of filtering out the important data from lots of irrelevant data," Roy said.
He added that patients should ask questions about pending test results. "They should never assume that no news is good news when it comes to waiting for a test result," he said.
More information
To learn more about hospitalists, visit the American College of Physicians.
