AHRQ Health IT Update: Automated Patient Test Results

AHRQ Health IT Update: Automated Patient Test Results

AHRQ Health IT Update: Automated Patient Test Results

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) sent this bulletin at 12/05/2013 09:18 AM EST

Emailing Providers Increases Awareness of Patient Test Results

Many patients have pending test results at the time of hospital discharge, and lack of appropriate follow-up on those results may pose a risk to a patient’s safety. Automatically emailing physicians test results when they become available increases provider awareness of results, according to research supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Providers who received the emails were significantly more likely to be aware of abnormal test results, suggesting that widespread use of such notifications could improve patient safety. “Impact of an automated email notification system for results of tests pending at discharge: a cluster randomized controlled trial,” appeared online October 23 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. This study examined the impact of automatically emailing test results that were pending at the time of discharge to both the hospital attending physician as well as the patient’s primary care provider.

Select to access the abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24154834.