Duplicated Laboratory Tests: A Hospital Audit

Abstract

To the Editor: Rising healthcare costs are unlikely to be sustainable in the current healthcare environment. Reducing costs is a major effort of governments and policymakers (1). One component of these costs is the wide range and overwhelming number of diagnostic tests (2). Laboratory testing of hospitalized patients can be redundant when multiple providers order the same or similar tests for the same patient, contributing needlessly to the total healthcare costs (3–5). We evaluated the frequency of duplicate ordering of 6 in-house laboratory tests (Table 1) in hospitalized patients over a 12-month period and analyzed the costs associated with this practice. Research questions for this study included the following: ( a ) In this sample of hospitalized patients, what was the prevalence of duplication of the selected laboratory tests over twelve months, and ( b ) what were the costs associated with duplication of these laboratory tests? View this table: Table 1. Costs and ordering patterns for 6 selected tests. A retrospective descriptive design was used to evaluate the prevalence that selected tests were duplicated. We chose these 6 tests because a medical need to have 2 results for these tests during …