Institute:Office of National Coordinator (ONC) Workforce Training Curriculum
Component:The Culture of Health Care
Unit:Evidence-Based Practice
Lecture:Phrasing the clinical question
Harm and prognosis
Slide content:Screening Tests for Disease Identification of unrecognized disease Aim to keep disease (or complications) from occurring (primary prevention) or stop progression (secondary prevention) Requirements for a screening test Low cost Intervention effectiveideally shown in randomized controlled trial High sensitivitydo not want to miss any cases; usually follow up with test of high specificity 8
Slide notes:8 Screening is related to diagnosis but is not quite the same. Screening is the identification of unrecognized disease. What we hope to do with screening is recognize disease so we can intervene at an early stage. We may aim to keep the disease or its complications from occurring, sometimes called primary prevention . Or we may want to prevent complications from developing when the disease is already present, sometimes called secondary prevention . What are the attributes of a good screening test? It should have a low cost because we typically apply screening to large numbers of people. A good screening test has to lead to an effective intervention, ideally documented by a randomized controlled trial of the screening intervention. Finally, the test should be of high sensitivity because we dont want to miss any cases, for example, or have any false-negative cases. A positive screening is usually followed up with a test of high specificity to make sure the screening result isnt a false-positive.