When No News Isn't Necessarily Good News

This story broke a little over a week ago, but it's an important one that I wanted to share. The Archives of Internal Medicine (a JAMA--Journal of the American Medical Association--publication) reported on a study completed at Weill Cornell (New York) Medical College regarding notifying patients of test results.

The news, in short, is not good: the study showed that an average of 7% of the time, patients whose test results were abnormal were not notified by their doctor, with some failure rates as high as 26%. Practices whose record keeping was part paper, part electronic fared the worst over those practices that were completely paper or completely electronic.

The study also surveyed doctors about in-house procedures for notifying patients of their medical test results. The findings of this survey were equally alarming: the average process score was 3.8 out of 6, with most medical practices not using all five of the basic processes suggested in literature. Further, most practices did not even have in place explicit guidelines for notifying patients of results.

Doctors say that the volume of patients and lack of time make it difficult to contact patients. But if practices don't even have a protocol in place about patients' medical tests results, it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone in the practice to notify patients, let alone the doctor.

Doctors are busy, there's no doubt about it. And given the decreasing amounts of money medical practices receive through health insurance reimbursement, doctors are only going to get busier and this situation is likely to get proportionately worse.

You'd think that doctors would be more mindful of this negligence, given that we live in such a litigious culture. Failing to provide a patient abnormal test results could certainly have disastrous results. But apparently this is happening, sometimes as many as one in four times.

This is clearly an example where you need to be the advocate for yourself, and badger the doctor's office for the results. Because just because you don't get the "all clear" from the doctor doesn't necessary mean everything is okay.