Ryan Swapp, M.D., Marie Christine Aubry, M.D., Diva Salomao, M.D., and John Cheville, M.D., all of Mayo Clinic's Division of Anatomic Pathology, recently released a study, "Outside Case Review of Surgical Pathology for Referred Patients: The Impact on Patient Care," that can now be found as an early online release in CAP Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine. The Division of Anatomic Pathology reviewed the pathology of nearly all patients that were referred to Mayo Clinic for treatment from 2005-2010. The objective was to identify the rate of major disagreements with diagnoses from external institutions and to characterize the nature and impact of discordant diagnoses on patient care. Below is a summary of the findings: "We found major disagreements only 0.6% of the time (457 of 71,811 cases) from 2005-2010.  The most frequent areas of disagreement were gastrointestinal (80 cases; 17.5%), lymph node (73;16.0%), bone/soft tissue (47; 10.3%), and genitourinary(43; 9.4%).  Further, we found that our disagreeing diagnosis was not always the correct one.  In a subset of these cases (n=86 disagreements from July 2009 – Dec 2010), subsequent tissue showed that the original diagnosis was correct 15.1% of the time (13 of 86 cases)."