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Failing to inform a patient of an abnormal outpatient test result can be a serious error, but little is known about the frequency of such errors or the processes for managing results that may reduce errors.

We conducted a retrospective medical record review of 5434 randomly selected patients aged 50 to 69 years in 19 community-based and 4 academic medical center primary care practices. Primary care practice physicians were surveyed about their processes for managing test results, and individual physicians were notified of apparent failures to inform and asked whether they had informed the patient. Blinded reviewers calculated a “process score” ranging from 0 to 5 for each practice using survey responses.

The rate of apparent failures to inform or to document informing the patient was 7.1% (135 failures divided by 1889 abnormal results), with a range of 0% to 26.2%. The mean process …