Why clinicians overtest: development of a thematic framework Justin H Lam (
[email protected] ) The University of Sydney https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6076-3999 Kristen Pickles The University of Sydney Fiona Stanaway The University of Sydney Katy JL Bell The University of Sydney Research article Keywords: medical overuse, health service misuse, overtest, overtesting, clinician Posted Date: October 12th, 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-43690/v2 License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Read Full License Version of Record: A version of this preprint was published on November 4th, 2020. See the published version at https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-020-05844-9. Page 1/36 Abstract Background: 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 inuence clinicians to request non-recommended and unnecessary tests. Methods: Articles exploring factors affecting clinician test ordering behaviour were identied through a systematic search of MedLine in April 2019, forward and backward citation searches and content experts. Two authors screened abstract titles and abstracts, and two authors screened full text for inclusion. Identied factors were categorised into a preliminary framework which was subsequently presented at the PODC for iterative development.