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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Jul 31.
Published in final edited form as: N Engl J Med. 2015 Apr 16;372(16):1530–1538. doi: 10.1056/NEJMsa1410846

Figure 2. Variation among Ophthalmologists in the Prevalence of Preoperative Testing and Office Visits.

Figure 2

Using data on ophthalmologists who performed five or more surgeries in 2011, we graphed the percentage of each ophthalmologist’s patients who underwent testing during the 30 days before index cataract surgery. Of the 9253 ophthalmologists who operated on five or more patients in 2011, more than one third (36%) had 75% or more of their patients undergo preoperative testing, and 8% ordered at least one preoperative test for every patient. The 36% of ophthalmologists who ordered testing for 75% or more of their patients treated only 26% of the total number of patients, but their patients accounted for 84% of all testing above the baseline level of testing. The variation in preoperative office visits was similar in magnitude to the variation in testing, and the use of office visits paralleled that of testing across providers. During the baseline period, the mean monthly prevalence of testing and office visits was 33% and 32%, respectively.