Teleconsultation in children with abdominal pain: a comparison of physician triage recommendations and an established paediatric telephone triage protocol

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Research Article

Gabrielle Marmier Staub¹  Jan von Overbeck¹  Eva Blozik² 

[1] Swiss Center for Telemedicine Medgate, Gellertstr. 19, 4020, Basel, Switzerland;Swiss Center for Telemedicine Medgate, Gellertstr. 19, 4020, Basel, Switzerland;Department of Primary Medical Care, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Martinistr. 52, 20246, Hamburg, Germany;

关键词: Appendicitis;    Electronic Patient Record;    Index Symptom;    Triage Criterion;    Quality Assurance System;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6947-13-110

 received in 2012-10-04, accepted in 2013-09-18,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundQuality assessment and continuous quality feedback to the staff is crucial for safety and efficiency of teleconsultation and triage. This study evaluates whether it is feasible to use an already existing telephone triage protocol to assess the appropriateness of point-of-care and time-to-treat recommendations after teleconsultations.MethodsBased on electronic patient records, we retrospectively compared the point-of-care and time-to-treat recommendations of the paediatric telephone triage protocol with the actual recommendations of trained physicians for children with abdominal pain, following a teleconsultation.ResultsIn 59 of 96 cases (61%) these recommendations were congruent with the paediatric telephone protocol. Discrepancies were either of organizational nature, due to factors such as local referral policies or gatekeeping insurance models, or of medical origin, such as milder than usual symptoms or clear diagnosis of a minor ailment.ConclusionsA paediatric telephone triage protocol may be applicable in healthcare systems other than the one in which it has been developed, if triage rules are adapted to match the organisational aspects of the local healthcare system.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Marmier Staub et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.