Every year, healthcare providers order billions of laboratory tests. The tests ordered are to catch diseases early, monitor chronic conditions, guide treatment decisions, and make sense of symptoms that defy a simple exam. Lab testing is, by any measure one of the most powerful tools in modern medicine.
And yet, roughly one in three of those tests never gets completed.
That's not a rounding error. It's a systemic failure - one with real consequences for patients, providers, and the labs trying to serve them both.
According to the CDC, approximately 14 billion laboratory tests are conducted in the United States each year, and an estimated 70% of medical decisions depend on their results. That means lab data isn't a supplement to critical care - it's a foundation for it. When that foundation has cracks, patient outcomes suffer.
And the cracks are significant. Industry data shows that roughly 30% of all lab orders fail to reach completion. These aren't tests that were reviewed and deemed unnecessary. They are ordered tests, with clinical intent, that simply don't happen. The specimen never gets collected. The results never get back to the provider. The decision never gets made.
The reasons are varied, but they tend to cluster around a few recurring themes.
Access gaps. Patients who live far from a collection site, lack transportation, or have limited mobility often can't complete a draw - even when they want to. A test ordered at a specialist's office in the city may require a patient to travel an hour or more for a five-minute blood draw. Many simply don't make the trip.
Fragmented logistics. Specialty labs frequently lack the infrastructure to connect patients with nearby collection sites. Coordinating a draw across multiple providers, scheduling systems, and kit shipment workflows is cumbersome - and when the process breaks down, the test falls through the cracks.
No-shows and scheduling failures. Even when collection sites are nearby, patients miss appointments. Without clear instructions, streamlined scheduling, and reminders, completion rates drop significantly.
Labor shortages. Finding trained phlebotomists and qualified specimen collectors in every market, particularly smaller metros, rural regions, and specialty settings, is increasingly difficult. Labs that can't find local collection labor can't serve local patients.
It's easy to frame an uncompleted lab test as a missed administrative step. But the downstream effects are anything but.
When a test doesn't get done, a diagnosis gets delayed, or missed entirely. A provider managing a patient with a suspected thyroid condition, a chronic infection, or a potential malignancy can't act on results they never receive. Treatment plans get deferred. Conditions that could have been caught early progress further. Patients who might have been managed effectively in an outpatient setting end up requiring more intensive, and more expensive, intervention later.
Mayo Clinic Laboratories has noted that laboratory testing plays a significant role not just in diagnosis, but in planning treatments, managing chronic conditions, and assessing treatment response. When that testing loop breaks, the entire care continuum is disrupted.
There's also an equity dimension. The patients most likely to face access barriers (those in rural areas, without reliable transportation, balancing multiple jobs or caregiving responsibilities, for example) are often the same patients with the highest disease burden. Incomplete lab orders don't just affect individual health outcomes. They widen existing disparities.
The good news is that this isn't an intractable challenge. The gap between ordered tests and completed tests exists largely because the infrastructure connecting labs to local collection labor has been underdeveloped. When that infrastructure exists completion rates improve dramatically.
That's exactly the problem My One Medical Source® (MOMS) was built to solve. By connecting specialty labs and other clients with a national network of MAPs: Medical Access Points/Providers™, MOMS creates the link that too often goes missing between an ordered test and a completed one.
With MAPs in all 50 states and across the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), the MOMS platform makes it possible for labs to access local collection labor compliantly and conveniently, without the need to build out their own infrastructure in every market.
A world where 30% of lab orders go uncompleted is a world where 30% of clinical decisions are being made without the data they were designed to inform. That's not acceptable - not for patients, not for providers, and not for the labs working hard to deliver accurate, timely results.
The infrastructure exists to close that gap. In the MOMS blog, we'll explore exactly how. From how the platform works, to what it means to be a MAP, to how better lab access translates to better patient outcomes.
Because #BetterAccess leads to #BetterOutcomes. And it starts with making sure the test actually gets done.
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Sources
1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About Medical Laboratory Professionals Week. CDC Division of Laboratory Systems. https://www.cdc.gov/lab-week/about-archive.html
2. Mayo Clinic Laboratories. 4 statistics that showcase the broad impact of laboratory medicine. April 2025. https://news.mayocliniclabs.com/2025/04/21/...
3. Hallworth, M.J. The '70% claim': what is the evidence base? Annals of Clinical Biochemistry, 2011. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1258/acb.2011.011177