News
President’s Blog: To whom my pathology report concerns
Friday July 26, 2024
Those of us in specialties that perform diagnostic services on request from other doctors have always existed in the paradigm that our interpretive report – of a pathology test or imaging study, for example – is a report between doctors.
The test is requested, our service performs it, and our specialists report it in unabashed medical language back to the requesting doctor. That information can then be filtered by the requesting doctor, using their own expert knowledge and understanding of the patient’s individual circumstances, to contextualise the results for the patient.
Requests by patients to receive copies of their own results have been increasing for many years. This is, of course, generally positive – it indicates that patients are increasingly engaged in their own care. It explains why many patients access their own results via My Health Record. Currently, most pathology results are subject to a seven-day delay. In other words, the patient cannot access their own result until seven days have passed after reporting by the pathologist to the requesting doctor. The rationale, clearly, is to enable the requesting doctor to absorb and contextualise the result before presenting it to the patient.
The Federal Government appears determined to remove the seven day delay for all results. Whilst there could be justification for removing a delay for some types of results that are unlikely to cause undue alarm or misplaced complacency on the part of the patient, there are many results that I would argue should be held back from the patient for a sufficient period for the requesting doctor to review them. This is unlikely to cause harm, but could well prevent harm.
Nonetheless, if this occurs, and in any case as patients increasingly access their own results, how does a pathologist or radiologist consider the information we provide in a report? Do we have a role in providing more accessible “lay” reports that can be understood by the patient, but are general enough as to not make any incorrect assumptions about the patient’s clinical circumstances thereby misleading the patient and interfering with the doctor-patient relationship? In my view, it would be preferable to leaving it to the patient’s imagination and Google to interpret the medical language of a report, before their doctor has had a chance to break good or bad news to them.
