Panels of clinical laboratory testing may generate "incidental" critical values from unordered parameters. Existing regulations do not clearly delineate guidelines for handling incidental critical values. The objective of this study was to examine the patterns and clinical utility of incidental critical values at 2 critical care laboratories within an academic medical center.
In this retrospective study, the electronic health record and laboratory information system were reviewed for incidental critical results obtained from blood gas analyzer analysis of whole blood specimens between November 2010 and August 2014.
Within the retrospective time period, 9,092 incidental critical results were documented, of which only 11.8% were added to the "parent" order following clinical notification. Incidental critical results frequently occurred in patients who had recent critical values for the same parameter.
In this study, at an academic medical center, incidental critical values associated with blood gas analyzers were added on at a low rate and often provided redundant information. Relative to the manual effort involved in care providers' notification and documentation of results, incidental critical values appear to have low clinical utility.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 27 January 2017.
All research outputs
#10,388,354
of 34,245,361 outputs
Outputs from Laboratory Medicine
#275
of 1,476 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#109,460
of 338,331 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Laboratory Medicine
#7
of 13 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,245,361 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 69th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,476 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 4.2. This one has done well, scoring higher than 81% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 338,331 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 67% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 13 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 46th percentile – i.e., 46% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
