In This Issue of Archives of Internal Medicine

C asalino et al found that physicians frequently fail to inform patients of important abnormal test results. They reviewed outpatient medical records of 5434 patients in 23 medical practices and found apparent failures to inform for 7.1% of important abnormal results; the failure rate ranged from 0% in 3 practices to 26% in 1 practice. Practices that used 5 simple processes to manage test results, such as having the physician sign off on all results, had significantly lower failure-to-inform rates.