Patients prefer expediency of telephone communication to receive skin biopsy results

Individuals awaiting skin biopsy results to rule out melanoma preferred telephone and electronic notifications to face-to-face discussions, according to study results.“Patients value timeliness of receiving results because delays can lead to increased anxiety,” Maria L. Wei, MD, PhD, of the department of dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues wrote. “Current guidelines on how to break bad news to patients with cancer are surprisingly not based on any systematic studies.”