No news isn’t necessarily good news for patients awaiting medical-test results.
Doctors fail to inform patients of abnormal cancer screenings and other test results one out of 14 times, according to a study, the first of its kind.
The failure rate was higher at some doctors’ offices, as high as 26 percent at one. Few medical practices had explicit methods for how to tell patients, leaving each doctor to come up with a system. In some offices, patients were told that if they didn’t hear anything, they could assume their results were normal.
The findings were published in yesterday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.