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Inappropriate repeats of six common tests in a Canadian city: a population cohort study within a laboratory
Eric K Morgen1, Christopher Naugler2
1From the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada; Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada and.
Objectives:
To identify inappropriate repeats of six common laboratory tests in a population sample of patients, using highly specific criteria based only on repeat time and test value.
Methods:
We used a laboratory informatics database to conduct a retrospective cohort study using a population sample of 103,000 patients in the city of Calgary with an index test in 2010 and uniform follow-up of 1 year. We examined six tests (cholesterol, hemoglobin A1c, thyroid-stimulating hormone, vitamin B12, vitamin D, and ferritin) with consensus-based or easily justified criteria for inappropriate repeats based solely on time to repeat and the index test value.
Results:
The percentages of tests repeated at 3, 6, and 12 months were 11%, 23%, and 41%, respectively. In total, 16% of these six tests were inappropriately repeated, representing an annual internal cost of $0.6 to $2.2 million Canadian dollars and corresponding to population-scaled national estimates for Canada and the United States of $160 million and $2.4 billion, respectively.
Conclusions:
Objective definitions based on repeated testing identified 16% of six studied tests as inappropriate, delineating a subset of inappropriate testing that is well suited to automated identification and intervention and that provides a likely lower bound on the true burden of inappropriate testing.
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