Health-care resources are wasted when doctors overuse diagnostic tests. The tests may be redundant or inappropriate in the first place, and may also generate false-positive results, which prompt further needless investigation, or cause adverse effects.
Over the past decade, the use of pathology laboratory tests is thought to have increased by 5% to 10% each year. At the same time, requests for diagnostic imaging (radiology) investigations have increased by approximately 9% per year. These services now account for approximately 15% of all Medicare outlays.
It’s difficult to ascertain the proportion of diagnostic investigations that represents genuine overuse because of the problem of defining “appropriate” testing. But in hospital settings, as many as two-thirds of requests for some common pathology tests may be avoidable, because they’ve been shown to have no impact on diagnosis or management.
