Approximately 80 percent of patients who have the hepatitis C virus may have been missed through EMR-reliant risk-based testing, according to research from the CDC.
The paper, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, analyzed EMR data from 2005 to 2010 for patients who used an outpatient primary care service at least once. The researchers estimated the proportion of the infected patients by identifying patient predictors of HCV positivity and then applying it to untested patients.
Of the study's 209,076 patients, the researchers used the model to determine that 81.5 percent of HCV positive patients were unidentified using risk-based testing.
"Unidentified anti-HCV+ persons cannot receive further clinical evaluation or antiviral treatment, and are unlikely to benefit from secondary prevention recommendations to limit disease progression and mortality," the researchers wrote in Clinical Infectious Diseases.