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8 suggested steps toward a robust follow-up system
7 minutes
Published: March 2019
The information in this article was correct at the time of publishing
A 53-year-old man sees a general surgeon for a colonoscopy, after having received a positive fecal occult blood test and noted to have a hemoglobin of 72 g/L. The colonoscopy is difficult and is terminated without the surgeon being able to fully visualize the colon. The surgeon orders a CT colonography to rule out a tumour. Unfortunately, the requisition gets lost and the patient never undergoes the procedure. Months later, the patient returns to the emergency department with symptoms of a bowel obstruction. At surgery, a large obstructive tumour is identified. Despite treatment, the patient dies and his family initiates a legal action alleging negligent delay in diagnosis due to the surgeon’s lack of follow-up on the investigation she ordered.
Many factors may lead to a diagnostic delay, such as failing to inform a patient of a test result. Physicians can reduce the likelihood of such delays by targeting improvement efforts on their system for following up on laboratory tests, diagnostic imaging, and consultations.
Many provincial and territorial regulatory authorities (Colleges) have policies that set their expectations of physicians for following up on test, imaging, and consultation requests and results. Indeed, having a reasonable system in place to achieve this goal is a professional obligation of physicians. While some types of tests are subject to established follow-up programs (e.g. Papanicolaou smear, fecal occult blood test, mammogram screening), in most other instances the responsibility for following up rests with the ordering physician.
Developing or improving a follow-up system may seem difficult, but the system need not be complicated. A follow-up system should be sufficiently robust so that test requisitions and results are reviewed and acted on in a reasonable period of time.
Start by understanding your practice. Determine what tests you typically order that would have a high likelihood of resulting in harm if mishandled. For example, if you regularly order tests to investigate malignancies (chest X-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds, mammograms, prostate-specific antigen) or coagulopathies (CBCs, INRs), you could focus your initial efforts on establishing or improving a formal system focused on these types of tests.
Don’t stop improving your process after an early success: continuous improvement is key to building a reliable system. When you spot a problem area, use a collaborative approach with other parties involved in the testing process (including nurses, reception staff, lab staff, and consultant physicians) to arrive at a mutually agreeable solution.
If you have an electronic medical record (EMR) system, the EMR is possibly among your best assets for creating a reliable follow-up system. Many EMRs have effective built-in functionalities for follow-up. Do you know how to leverage yours? Your EMR vendor may be able to help. As well, your provincial or territorial medical association or federation may offer EMR support. OntarioMD (www.ontariomd.ca ), for example, offers a peer support service to help physicians make the most of their EMR’s features.
In a review of CMPA family practice medical-legal cases in which a follow-up issue was found to contribute to a patient safety incident, more than half (60%) of the cases involved a deficiency in one step of the follow-up process while the remaining 40% involved deficiencies across multiple steps.
The diagram below, adapted from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the United States, conceptualizes the process of test result follow-up as a series of steps. 1 Improvements in one or more steps may reduce the risk of failures. A reliable follow-up system includes safeguards at each step so that there is redundancy of defences. If one step fails, another step later in the process ideally compensates for the oversight.
For each step, a potential problem area is described, followed by suggested mitigation solutions.
The surgeon and her colleagues embark on improving their follow-up system. Because their EMR system does not support the follow-up of test results, they assign their office clerk to create and manage a spreadsheet-based parallel system to track results. The surgeons agree to harmonize their practices, including how they receive results from the clerk. They consider giving every patient automatic follow-up appointments, but because of a lack of clinic space, they opt to have the clerk close the loop with all patients, even with normal results. To help promote adherence to treatment plans, they create a simple patient handout to reinforce the importance of getting tests done, which they provide to every patient. They apply new rigor to documenting no-shows and recalls for difficult-to-reach patients. Finally, to avoid missing results due to physician absences, they assign one surgeon each week to deal with abnormal findings when the referring colleague is not in the office.
Visit Workshops to learn more about test result follow-up systems.
DISCLAIMER: This content is for general informational purposes and is not intended to provide specific professional medical or legal advice, nor to constitute a "standard of care" for Canadian healthcare professionals. Your use of CMPA learning resources is subject to the foregoing as well as CMPA's Terms of Use.