Prevalence and predictability of low-yield inpatient laboratory diagnostic tests.
Increasingly, medical overuse—including the ordering of unnecessary tests for patients—is being characterized as a patient safety problem. In this retrospective study involving inpatients treated at three academic medical centers, researchers found that ordering laboratory tests with low diagnostic yield was common. Implementing machine learning models, as they did in this study, has the potential to promote high-value care by characterizing the diagnostic utility of information gained from ordering tests.