Introduction: Diagnostic testing is common in the emergency department. The value of some testing is questionable. The purpose of this study was to assess how varying levels of benefit, risk, and costs influenced an individual’s desire to have diagnostic testing.
Methods: A survey through Amazon Mechanical Turk presented hypothetical clinical situations: low risk chest pain and minor traumatic brain injury. Each scenario included three given variables (benefit, risk, and cost), that was independently randomly varied over four possible values (0.1%, 1%, 5%, 10% for benefit and risk and $0, $100, $500, and $1000 for the individual’s personal cost for receiving the test). Benefit was defined as the probability of finding the target disease (traumatic intracranial hemorrhage or acute coronary syndrome).
Results: A total of 1000 unique respondents completed the survey. Increasing benefit from 0.1% to 10%, the percent of respondents who accepted a diagnostic test went from 28.4% to 53.1%. [OR: 3.42 (2.57-4.54)] As risk increased from 0.1% to 10%, this number decreased from 52.5% to 28.5%. [OR: 0.33 (0.25-0.44)] Increasing cost from $0 to $1000 had the greatest change of those accepting the test from 61.1% to 21.4%, respectively. [OR: 0.15 (0.11-0.2)]
Conclusions: The desire for testing was strongly sensitive to the benefits, risks and costs. Many participants wanted a test when there was no added cost, regardless of benefit or risk levels, but far fewer elected to receive the test as cost increased incrementally. This suggests that out of pocket costs may deter patients from undergoing diagnostic testing with low potential benefit.
