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To determine how often practicing physicians use the customarily recommended quantitative methods that include sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratio indexes; receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves; and Bayesian diagnostic calculations.

A random sample of 300 practicing physicians (stratified by specialty to include family physicians, general internists, general surgeons, pediatricians, obstetrician/gynecologists, and internal medicine subspecialists) were briefly interviewed in a telephone survey. They were asked about the frequency with which they used the formal methods, the reasons for non-use, and if they employed alternative strategies when appraising tests’ diagnostic accuracy.

Of the 300 surveyed physicians, 8 (3%) used the recommended formal Bayesian calculations, 3 used ROC curves, and 2 used likelihood ratios. The main reasons cited for non …