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My resident describes our next emergency room patient — a 32-year-old female with severe, crampy mid-abdominal pain, vomiting and occasional loose stools. The symptoms have been present for nearly a week, and there is tenderness to both sides of the upper abdomen. It could be a gallbladder problem, the resident says, hepatitis, pancreatitis, diverticulitis or an atypical appendicitis. She proposes routine blood tests along with an ultrasound and an abdominal CT scan.
This is the time-honored approach to an undifferentiated patient complaint: Generate a list of possible diagnoses, decide which represent a “reasonable” concern and use the results from further testing to conclude what’s going on. Yet increasingly the second phase of this process — evaluating which diagnoses represent a reasonable concern — is getting short shrift. It is the heavy lift of any patient encounter — weighing disease probabilities, probing for details. It’s often simpler, and faster, to cast a wide net, click the standard order for blood work and imaging, and wait for the results to pop up.
The issue of the “busy doctor ordering too many tests” has plagued medicine for decades. Now, as hospitals inject algorithms and technology into their workflow, it’s much worse. Medicine is moving inexorably away from the deductive arts, becoming more technology- and test-dependent and less patient-centric.
Go to an emergency room today and you will likely be met within minutes by a doctor whose sole role is to perform a “rapid medical evaluation.” The provider asks a few questions, ticks boxes on a computer screen and, shazam, you are in line for the most likely series of tests and scans, all based on typically a less than 60-second encounter.
This strategy seems obvious. When workups are initiated as soon as the patient arrives, wait times go down, patient satisfaction goes up, and fewer patients leave out of frustration before even being seen. These are the metrics that put smiles on administrators’ faces and give hospitals high marks in national surveys.
But is it good doctoring? Without the luxury of time, these gateway providers typically lump patients into broad, generic categories: the middle-aged person with chest pain, the short-of-breath asthmatic, the vomiting pregnant patient, the septuagenarian with cough and fever, and so forth. The diagnosis is then reverse-engineered with tests to cover all possible bases for that particular complaint.