To describe the proportion of glucose tests with unrecorded provenance in routine primary care data and identify the impact on clinical practice.
A cross-sectional analysis was conducted of blood glucose measurements from the Royal College of General Practitioner Research and Surveillance Centre database, which includes primary care records from >100 practices across England and Wales. All blood glucose results recorded during 2013 were identified. Tests were grouped by provenance (fasting, oral glucose tolerance test, random, none specified and other). A clinical audit in a single primary care practice was also performed to identify the impact of failing to record glucose provenance on diabetes diagnosis.
A total of 2 137 098 people were included in the cross-sectional analysis. Of 203 350 recorded glucose measurements the majority (117 893; 58%) did not have any provenance information. The most commonly reported provenance was fasting glucose (75 044; 37%). The distribution of glucose values where provenance was not recorded was most similar to that of fasting samples. The glucose measurements of 256 people with diabetes in the audit practice (size 11 514 people) were analysed. The initial glucose measurement had no provenance information in 164 cases (64.1%). A clinician questioned the provenance of a result in 41 cases (16.0%); of these, 14 (34.1%) required repeating. Lack of provenance led to delays in the diagnosis of diabetes [median (range) 30 (3-614) days].
The recording of glucose provenance in UK primary care could be improved. Failure to record provenance causes unnecessary repeated testing, delayed diagnosis and wasted clinician time. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 14. 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 21 March 2018.
All research outputs
#2,847,286
of 27,710,619 outputs
Outputs from Diabetic Medicine
#594
of 4,232 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#45,642
of 417,514 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Diabetic Medicine
#7
of 50 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 27,710,619 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 89th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 4,232 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 9.4. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% 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 417,514 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 88% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 50 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 86% of its contemporaries.
