Emergency Medical Minute Podcast # 327: No More Hemoccults
May 9, 2018
02:52
Author: Don Stader, MD
Educational Pearls:
- The use of fecal occult blood tests is falling out of favor in emergency departments
- These tests have strong evidence suggesting their efficacy in colon cancer screening but clinical significance in ED is limited
- They have relatively high false positive and false negative rates
- Small/microscopic bleeding are often not clinically significant in the ED but can lead to increased costs from over-testing and other harms from fecal occult blood testing
References:
Gupta A, Tang Z, Agrawal D. Eliminating In-Hospital Fecal Occult Blood Testing: Our Experience with Disinvestment. American Journal of Medicine. (2018). 10.1016/j.amjmed.2018.03.002