Experts See Continued Gaps In Measuring Ambulatory Safety

“Here’s my one wish,” she adds: “that there should be a requirement in the certification criteria that required systems to flag and notify providers of abnormal test results that had not been viewed within a  week of the time they were available.” She also recommends that for imaging procedures, the system should continue to remind a provider until there is confirmation of follow-up.

Drazen says that the Veteran’s Administration did studies to improve this problem and sent electronic notifications of a test result not only to the ordering provider, but also to the primary care provider. In these studies, the follow-up of lab results actually declined because each provider assumed the other was looking at the result and notifying the patient. “We need to do experiments to find out what the effects are because sometimes your gut feeling is wrong,” she says. “But secondly, by building capability to look to see if someone opened the result, and give them the ability to escalate those results that weren’t opened, and to then do research to see what interventions were successful.”