Diagnostic Stewardship
Starts with Smarter Testing
Purposeful testing strategies help healthcare teams make more confident decisions, improve efficiency, and support value-based care.
Explore resources designed to support your diagnostic stewardship efforts, helping you focus on clinically relevant results while reducing unnecessary complexity.
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Background
The challenge: More testing does not always mean better care.
Broad, one-size-fits-all testing strategies can create unintended challenges for clinicians, laboratories, and health systems.
While comprehensive testing plays an important role in the right context, testing beyond what a patient needs can:
- Increase costs
- Complicate result interpretation
- Lead to unnecessary follow-up or treatment
Diagnostic stewardship addresses this challenge by aligning testing decisions with clinical need. This helps ensure each result contributes meaningful value.
What is Diagnostic Stewardship?
Diagnostic stewardship is an evidence-based approach to optimizing test utilization.
It focuses on ordering the right test, for the right patient, at the right time, supporting more informed clinical decisions while minimizing unnecessary testing and cost.
This approach is not about limiting access to testing. It improves the value of diagnostic information by aligning testing strategies with:
- Patient presentation
- Risk factors
- Clinical guidelines
- Care setting and epidemiology
By moving from fixed testing to intentional testing, healthcare teams can achieve clearer answers, more efficient workflows, and stronger alignment with care goals.
How does Diagnostic Stewardship in infectious diseases work?
Every implementation is different, but these five pathways can help guide a stewardship strategy.
Start with the patient
Align testing with symptoms, exposure history, risk profile, and care setting to identify the most clinically relevant targets.
Use evidence-based guidance
Apply clinical guidelines, ordering criteria, and pre-test probability to determine when targeted or broader testing is appropriate.
Integrate into workflows
Incorporate stewardship into daily operations through tools such as:
- Ordering algorithms
- Reflex criteria
- Clinical decision support
- Dashboards, audits, and feedback
Expand when clinically justified
A scalable approach does not limit care. Testing can expand when needed based on patient risk, evolving clinical presentation, or emerging pathogens.
Measure and refine
Track outcomes such as test utilization, turnaround time, and antimicrobial impact, then adjust criteria to keep improving stewardship performance.
Why implement Diagnostic Stewardship?
Diagnostic stewardship can help healthcare organizations:
- Improve clinical relevance by focusing on tests and targets that are most likely to inform patient care.
- Reduce unnecessary testing by aligning orders with symptoms, guidelines, risk factors, and care settings.
- Support clearer, actionable results by minimizing result noise and reducing the potential for unnecessary follow-up.
- Advance value-based care goals by connecting diagnostic decisions to outcomes, efficiency, and responsible resource utilization.
- Strengthen collaboration between laboratories, clinicians, stewardship committees, payers, and health system leaders.
- Support more patient-centered care by helping deliver diagnostic answers that contribute to better capability, comfort, and calm throughout the care journey.
The LIAISON Molecular Testing Solution
LIAISON NES®
The LIAISON NES® platform represents a breakthrough in molecular diagnostics, bringing laboratory-quality PCR testing to the point of care. Designed for clinical settings where speed and accuracy are critical, LIAISON NES® combines advanced technology with intuitive operation.
LIAISON PLEX®
The LIAISON PLEX® System is a next-generation, multiplex, sample-to-answer molecular diagnostic platform. Its proprietary Flex® Software enables users to pay only for required targets, with the option to customize targets as needed.
LIAISON® MDX
The LIAISON® MDX real-time PCR system simplifies quality-enhanced run processing for reliable patient testing leveraging minimal sample input without extraction for efficient, flexible, and faster clinical outputs using an expansive and differentiated test menu on simple testing modalities, including open mode capabilities for maximal utilities.
Resources
Explore educational resources designed to help healthcare professionals better understand diagnostic stewardship and apply more intentional testing strategies.
Podcast
Beyond the Result
Diasorin's Diagnostic Stewardship podcast hosted by Angelo Rago.
White Paper
Diagnostic Stewardship White Paper
Review evidence on how smarter testing strategies can help reduce unnecessary costs while maintaining diagnostic confidence.
Blog
Customizing Panels, Personalizing Care: The Next Step in Molecular Diagnostics
Explore how patient-centered testing strategies can align diagnostics with symptoms, risk factors, epidemiology, and clinical need.
Blog
More Isn’t Better: How Diagnostic Stewardship is Redefining Test Utilization
Learn why targeted, evidence-based testing can help improve clinical value, reduce unnecessary utilization, and support more sustainable care.
Ready to Build a More Intentional Testing Strategy
Diagnostic stewardship helps healthcare teams move from fixed testing to testing with purpose. Contact us to learn how you can support more clinically relevant, cost-conscious, and patient-centered diagnostic decisions.