The study, titled “Survey Study of Anesthesiologists’ and Surgeons’ Ordering of Unnecessary Preoperative Laboratory Tests,” was conducted to examine whether unnecessary preoperative testing persists. The study looked at medical records of 1,000 consecutive patients scheduled for surgery at SUNY at Stony Brook (N.Y.) and examined those records for testing outside the facility’s approved guidelines.
More than half the patients studied had at least one unnecessary test based on the study’s testing guidelines. Among 17 potential predictors of anesthesiologists’ unnecessary ordering, only training completed before 1980 significantly increased the risk of ordering at least one unnecessary test (by 48 percent).
Read the abstract of the study in Anesthesia & Analgesia.
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