Selecting cases for feedback to pre-hospital clinicians ? a pilot study.

Conclusion A modest proportion of cases demonstrated discordance between the pre-hospital and in-hospital diagnoses. Selective case identification and feedback to pre-hospital services using a combination of informatics extraction and clinician consensus approach can be used to promote ongoing improvements to pre-hospital patient care.What is known about the topic? Highly trained pre-hospital clinicians perform patient assessments and early interventions while transporting patients to healthcare facilities for ongoing management. Feedback is necessary to allow for continual improvements; however, the provision of formal selective feedback regarding diagnostic accuracy from hospitals to pre-hospital clinicians is currently not routine.What does this paper add? For a significant proportion of patients, there is a clinically important difference in the diagnosis recorded by their pre-hospital clinician compared with their final in-hospital diagnosis. These clinically significant differences in diagnoses between pre-hospital and in-hospital clinicians were most notable among acute myocardial infarction and trauma subgroups of patients in this study.What are the implications for practitioners? Identification of patients who have a significant discrepancy between their pre-hospital and in-hospital diagnoses could lead to the development of feedback mechanisms to pre-hospital clinicians. Providing pre-hospital clinicians with this selective feedback would be intended to promote ongo...
Source: Australian Health Review - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Aust Health Rev Source Type: research