Why clinicians overtest: development of a thematic framework.

Abstract

Medical tests provide important information to guide clinical management. Overtesting, however, may cause harm to patients and the healthcare system, including through misdiagnosis, false positives, false negatives and overdiagnosis. Clinicians are ultimately responsible for test requests, and are therefore ideally positioned to prevent overtesting and its unintended consequences. Through this narrative literature review and workshop discussion with experts at the Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference (Sydney, 2019), we aimed to identify and establish a thematic framework of factors that influence clinicians to request non-recommended and unnecessary test.