Background: It is often assumed resident physicians at academic medical centers order more tests for inpatients due to different aspects of the clinical learning environment.  Despite this prevailing notion, there is very little evidence to support this claim. We sought to quantify differences in ordering practices between teaching hospitals and non-teaching hospitals for two common [...]

Background: It is often assumed resident physicians at academic medical centers order more tests for inpatients due to different aspects of the clinical learning environment.  Despite this prevailing notion, there is very little evidence to support this claim. We sought to quantify differences in ordering practices between teaching hospitals and non-teaching hospitals for two common [...]

Background:  Healthcare delivery has become more expensive, with a portion of the elevated cost due to increased utilization of laboratory studies. The Choosing Wisely campaign is an initiative of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation focused on preventing wasteful care. Accordingly, the Critical Care Societies Collaborative developed an evidence-based list describing overutilization practices.  This [...]

Background: Unnecessary diagnostic testing contributes to the escalating cost of health care in the US and can cause harm to patients. Daily blood work has become a routine part of care for hospitalized adults though only a fraction of tests change diagnosis or management decisions. At academic medical centers, residents are responsible for ordering most [...]

Background: Studies have shown that overutilization of labs is common and can cause adverse health outcomes.  No study to date has compared whether variation in lab ordering tendencies exists between different services within the same hospital.       Methods: This observational study combined a survey of internal medicine residents and hospitalists and a retrospective [...]

Background: Cost associated with diagnostic testing contributes greatly to the rising cost of health care in the United States (Bindraban et al, 2018). There is evidence to suggest that up to 20% of lab testing is unnecessary (Bindraban et al, 2018).Main Line Health (MLH) is a health system in suburban Philadelphia made up of four [...]