Shared Imperiatives: Diagnostic Excellence, EMR Nudges, and Smarter Testing Strategies

With the 2026 conference season underway, Infection Control Today^® (ICT^®) is posting interviews from last year. Attending conferences can significantly enhance your leadership and career trajectory, and here is an interview from IDWeek 2025 that hints at what you’ll miss if you don’t go.

At IDWeek 2025, held in Atlanta, Georgia, from October 19 to 22, Connie Savor, MD, chief medical officer at Cepheid, framed diagnostic excellence as a shared imperative for clinicians and administrators alike. “For the health care provider, it’s about the right test for the right patient at the right time; for the health care administrator, it’s cost and resource stewardship,” she said. “Diagnostic excellence captures all of those things and guides excellent patient care.”

Savor organized her takeaways around 3 recurring questions:

1) Are we testing the right patient?
Pretest probability still rules. “You have to know who you’re testing and what the likelihood of the infection is,” she noted. Ordering should begin with a clinical hypothesis, then use the test to confirm or refute it, rather than fishing for any positive result.

2) Are we choosing the right test?
Clinical context matters: location (intensive care unit vs clinic), host factors (immunocompromised vs healthy), and circulating pathogens. “Where is the patient located? Is the patient sick or immunocompromised?… All of these things are important in deciding which test to choose,” Savor said. For Clostridioides difficile, a focused assay may be sufficient when the question is binary: is C difficile the culprit? During the respiratory season, broader panels that cover multiple viruses may be more appropriate. “It’s important to have the flexibility in your platform,” she emphasized, “to choose single-pathogen testing or go broader based on the situation.”

3) Are we testing at the right time?
Timing shifts with seasonality and outbreaks. “You have to know when to test… whether it’s flu season or not, or if there is an outbreak,” Savor said. The same patient on 2 different days or in 2 different epidemiologic contexts may warrant different diagnostic approaches.

A practical surprise from their session: small nudges in electronic medical records (EMRs) work. “It was shocking to see that with a very simple EMR intervention, providers were deterred from ordering overly broad tests when they didn’t need to,” she reported. The finding suggests convenience, not clinical need, sometimes drives overtesting and that subtle EMR guardrails can realign behavior toward appropriateness.

Savor’s bottom line threads accuracy with stewardship: start with a clinical question, consider risk and context, then match test breadth to need. “Diagnostic excellence,” she concluded, “is the integration of clinical judgment, epidemiology, and platform flexibility, so patients get the answer they need without unnecessary cost or complexity.”