4.4 Laboratory and clinician communication

Helping individual physicians to select and interpret diagnostic tests on the appropriate clinical specimens is the major goal of diagnostic stewardship, and good communication between the laboratory and the clinicians is important in achieving this. Similarly, clinicians can help laboratories to process samples optimally by providing relevant patient clinical data and clinician contact details on the request form. The laboratory should inform the clinician when they can expect to receive the result, and should notify the clinician with the result, explaining its interpretation (if needed) and ideally being available by phone to answer any questions (Dik et al., 2017).