Figure 3.

Patient enrollment. Flow of patients identified by the automated email notification system during the study period. Patients with tests pending at discharge (TPADs) discharged from the general medicine and cardiology services were identified by the system. The system was configured to automatically exclude patients with discordant physician pairs and patients for whom the attending physician and primary care physician (PCP) were the same individual. Additionally, it automatically excluded every other patient with only microbiology TPADs. Finally, it excluded patients with TPADs whose PCP could not be identified (ie, missing the internal ID), or whose responsible physicians were not previously randomized (ie, when research staff were unavailable to manually randomize the PCP at time of discharge before the randomization process was automated).