scholarly journals Predicting mortality and readmission based on chief complaint in emergency department patients: a cohort study

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. e000604
Author(s):  
Søren Flink Sørensen ◽  
Stig Holm Ovesen ◽  
Marianne Lisby ◽  
Mia Hansen Mandau ◽  
Ida Katrine Thomsen ◽  
...  

BackgroundEmergency department (ED) patients present with complaints and not diagnoses. Characterization and risk stratification based on chief complaint can therefore help clinicians improve ED workflow and clinical outcome. In this study we investigated the 30-day mortality and readmission among ED patients based on chief complaint.MethodsIn this cohort study we retrieved routinely collected data from electronic medical records and the Danish Civil Registration System of all ED contacts from July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2017. All patients triaged with one chief complaint using the Danish Emergency Process Triage system were included. Patients with minor injuries were excluded. The chief complaint assigned by the triaging nurse was used as exposure, and 30-day mortality and 30-day readmission were the primary outcomes. Logistic regression was used to determine crude and adjusted ORs with reference to the remaining study population.ResultsA total of 41 470 patients were eligible. After exclusion of minor injuries and patients not triaged, 19 325 patients were included. The 30-day mortality and 30-day readmission differed significantly among the chief complaints. The highest 30-day mortality was observed among patients presenting with altered level of conscousness (ALOC) (8.4%, OR=2.0, 95% CI 1.3 to 3.1) and dyspnea (8.0%, OR=2.1, 95% CI 1.6 to 2.6). 30-day readmission was highest among patients presenting with fever/infection (11.7%, OR=1.9, 95% CI 1.4 to 2.4) and dyspnea (11.2%, OR=1.7, 95% CI 1.4 to 2.0).DiscussionChief complaint is associated with 30-day mortality and readmission in a mixed ED population. ALOC and dyspnea had the highest mortality; fever/infection and dyspnea had the highest readmission rate. This knowledge may assist in improving and optimizing symptom-based initial diagnostic workup and treatment, and ultimately improve workflow and clinical outcome.Level of evidenceLevel III.

QJM ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 112 (9) ◽  
pp. 675-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
L E Lyngholm ◽  
C H Nickel ◽  
J Kellett ◽  
S Chang ◽  
T Cooksley ◽  
...  

Abstract Objective To determine the ability of a normal D-dimer level (<0.5 mg/l) to identify emergency department (ED) patients at low risk of 30-day all-cause mortality. Design In this prospective observational study, D-dimer levels of adult medical patients were assessed at arrival to the ED. Data on 30-day survival status were extracted from the Danish Civil Registration System with complete follow-up. Setting The Hospital of South West Jutland. Patients All patients aged 18 years or older who required any blood sample on a clinical indication on arrival to the ED. Participants were required to give written informed consent before enrollment. Main results The study population of 1 518 patients with median age 66 years of which 49.4% were female. Of the 791 (52.1%) patients with normal D-dimer levels, 3 (0.4%) died within 30 days; one death resulted from an unrelated traumatic accident. Of the 727 (47.9%) patients with abnormal D-dimer levels (≥0.50 mg/l), 32 (4.4%) died within 30 days. Patients with normal D-dimer levels had a significantly lower 30-day mortality compared to patients with abnormal D-dimer levels (odds ratio 0.08, 95% CI 0.02–0.28): of the 35 patients who died within 30 days, 19 (54.3%) had normal or near normal vital signs when first assessed. Conclusion Normal D-dimer levels identified patients at low risk of 30-day mortality. Since most patients who died within 30 days presented with normal or near normal vital signs, D-dimer levels appear to provide additional prognostic information.


2019 ◽  
pp. emermed-2019-208456
Author(s):  
S M Osama Bin Abdullah ◽  
Rune Husås Sørensen ◽  
Ram Benny Christian Dessau ◽  
Saifullah Muhammed Rafid Us Sattar ◽  
Lothar Wiese ◽  
...  

BackgroundFew prospective studies have evaluated the quick Sequential (Sepsis-Related) Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) criteria in emergency department (ED)settings. The aim of this study was to determine the prognostic accuracy of qSOFA compared with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) in predicting the 28-day mortality of infected patients admitted to an ED.MethodsA prospective observational cohort study of all adult (≥18 years) infected patients admitted to the ED of Slagelse Hospital, Denmark, was conducted from 1 October 2017 to 31 March 2018. Patients were enrolled consecutively and data related to SIRS and qSOFA criteria were obtained from electronic triage record. Information regarding mortality was obtained from the Danish Civil Registration System. The original cut-off values of ≥2 was used to determine the prognostic accuracy of SIRS and qSOFA criteria for predicting 28-day mortality and was assessed by analyses of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, likelihood ratios and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) with 95% confidence intervals (CI).ResultsA total of 2112 patients were included in this study. A total of 175 (8.3%) patients met at least two qSOFA criteria, while 1012 (47.9%) met at least two SIRS criteria on admission. A qSOFA criteria of at least two for predicting 28-day mortality had a sensitivity of 19.5% (95% CI 13.6% to 26.5%) and a specificity of 92.6% (95% CI 91.4% to 93.7%). A SIRS criteria of at least two for predicting 28-day mortality had a sensitivity of 52.8% (95% CI 44.8% to 60.8%) and a specificity of 52.5% (95% CI 50.2% to 54.7%). The AUROC values for qSOFA and SIRS were 0.63 (95% CI 0.59 to 0.67) and 0.52 (95% CI 0.48 to 0.57), respectively.ConclusionBoth SIRS and qSOFA had poor sensitivity for 28-day mortality. qSOFA improved the specificity at the expense of the sensitivity resulting in slightly higher prognostic accuracy overall.


BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. e047982
Author(s):  
Bolette Gylden Soussi ◽  
Christian Sørensen Bork ◽  
Salome Kristensen ◽  
Søren Lundbye-Christensen ◽  
Kirsten Duch ◽  
...  

IntroductionRheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune inflammatory joint disease with multifactorial aetiology. Smoking is a well-established lifestyle risk factor, but diet may also have an impact on the risk of RA. Intake of the major marine n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in particular eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) have been hypothesised to lower the risk of RA due to their anti-inflammatory effects, although based on limited knowledge. Therefore, we aim to investigate the associations between dietary intake of EPA and DHA and the risk of incident RA.Methods and analysisA cohort study. The follow-up design will be based on data from the Danish Diet, Cancer and Health cohort, which was established between 1993 and 1997. The participants will be followed through record linkage using nationwide registers including the Danish Civil Registration System, the Danish National Patient Registry and the Danish National Prescription Registry using the unique Civil Personal Registration number. Time-to-event analyses will be conducted with RA as the outcome of interest. The participants will be followed from inclusion until date of RA diagnosis, death, emigration or end of follow-up. HRs with 95% CIs obtained using Cox proportional hazard regression models, with age as underlying time scale and adjustment for established and potential risk factors, will be used as measures of association.Ethics and disseminationThe study has been approved by the Data Protection Committee of Northern Jutland, Denmark (2019-87) and the North Denmark Region Committee on Health Research Ethics (N-20190031). Study results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed journals and presentations at international conferences.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Sell

ObjectiveTo describe the effect of symptom negation in emergencydepartment (ED) chief complaint data received by the New York City(NYC) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), and todevise a solution to avoid syndrome and symptom misclassificationfor commonly used negations using SAS Perl Regular Expression(PRX) functions.IntroductionIn July 2016, 77% of ED data was transmitted daily via HealthLevel 7 (HL7) messages, compared to only 27% in July 2015(Figure). During this same period, chief complaint (CC) word counthas increased from an average of 3.8 words to 6.0 words, with atwenty-fold increase in the appearance of the word “denies” in thechief complaint (Figure). While HL7 messages provide robust chiefcomplaint data, this may also introduce errors that could lead tosymptom and syndrome misclassification.MethodsUsing SAS 9.4 and Tableau 9.3, we examined data submissionsfrom 14 EDs responsible for 97% of the occurrences of the word‘denies’ in chief complaints in July 2016.To account for variation in chief complaint format among hospitals,we developed three PRX patterns to identify entire phrases in thechief complaint data field that began with conjugations of the word“deny” followed by various combinations of words, punctuation,spaces, and/or characters.Pattern 1: '/DEN(Y|I(ES|ED|NG))(\s|\w|(\/)|(\+)|,|(\\)){1,}((\.)|(\|)|($)|(;)|(\))|(-))/’Pattern 2: '/DEN(Y|I(ES|ED|NG))(\s|\w|(\/)|(\+)|(\\)){1,}((\.)|(\|)|($)|(;)|(\))|(-)|(,))/';Pattern 3: '/DENIES:( |\w|\.|,){1,}/');We separated the ‘denies’ statement from the chief complaint andidentified commonly negated symptoms. We then defined symptomsusing keyword searches of the chief complaint and the ‘denies’statement. We compared symptom classification with and withoutthe consideration of symptom negation.ResultsOf the 14 EDs analyzed, we applied pattern 1 to 8 of the ED’s,pattern 2 to 5 EDs, and patterns 2 and 3 to 1 ED. Approximately98% of denies statements were extracted from chief complaints. Only2% of symptom negation was not captured due to uncommon chiefcomplaint format whose symptom negation didn’t meet one of thepreviously described PRX patterns.The most common words associated with a “denies” statementwere: pain, chest, fever, loc, shortness, breath, vomiting, nausea,travel, headache, recent, trauma, history, abdominal, injury, diarrhea,SOB (shortness of breath), V (vomit), Head, N (nausea), PMH (pastmedical history), suicidal, dizziness, homicidal and D (diarrhea) (seeTable).By not taking negation into consideration in symptom definitions,between 3.5% and 16.5% of symptom visits were misclassified.Symptom misclassification varied greatly by hospital, ranging from0% to 55%.ConclusionsAs hospitals in NYC implement HL7 messaging, symptomnegation is becoming increasingly common in chief complaint data.Current symptom definitions are based on keyword searches that donot take into account symptom negations. This leads to symptommisclassification, and could potentially cause false signals or inflatesyndrome baselines, causing true signals to go undetected. SAS PRXfunctions can be used to flexibly identify symptom negation patternsand exclude them from syndrome definitions. Future studies willquantify the effect symptom negation has had on signal frequency inNYC, and examine symptoms associated with other forms of negationsuch as “Personal Medical History”, “No” and “Negative.”Most Common Symptoms Denied in Emergency Department Chief Complaints


Circulation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 141 (Suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle L Meyer ◽  
Montika Bush ◽  
Jason J Bischof ◽  
Anna E Waller ◽  
Timothy F Platts-Mills

Background: Around 1 million United States emergency department (ED) visits per year are due to exacerbation of heart failure (HF) symptoms, with ~80% of those patients admitted to the hospital. However, sex and age differences in HF symptom presentation in the ED have not been thoroughly investigated. Objectives: To describe sex and age differences in chief complaints of ED patients with a HF diagnosis. Methods: We included patients ≥18 years old with an ED diagnosis of HF in NC DETECT, a statewide syndromic surveillance system. We defined a HF diagnosis using ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM codes from ED visits between 2010 and 2016. We classified the ED chief complaints into categories by symptom groups (e.g. respiratory complaint includes hypoxia, respiratory distress, breathing difficulties). Chief complaint categories are not mutually exclusive. We calculated frequencies of chief complaint categories for ED visits by sex and age (18-44 (n=55,216), 45-64 (n=260,397), ≥65 (n=578,313) years old) and evaluated for a 10% standardized difference between groups. Results: There were 422,720 patients with 893,950 total unique visits (1.6 average visits/person). Of these visits, 55.0% were by women and 59.5% patients were admitted. Overall, the top chief complaint categories were dyspnea (19.1%), chest pain (13.5%), and respiratory complaints (13.4%), and were similar by sex and by ED disposition (admitted or discharged) and sex. When stratified by sex and age group, in those 18-44 years old, women had more reports of nausea/vomiting (6.7%) compared with men (4.1%) and headache (4.2%) compared with men (2.0%). In those 45-64 and ≥65 years old, chief complaint categories were similar between women and men. When stratified by age group alone, reports of chest pain decreased with age (21.4% in 18-44, 17.7% in 45-64, and 10.8% in ≥65 year olds), whereas reports of balance issues (1.2% in 18-44, 2.4% in 45-64, and 6.0% in ≥65 year olds), weakness (1.7% in 18-44, 2.7% in 45-64, and 5.5% in ≥65 year olds), and confusion (0.8% in 18-44, 2.1% in 45-64, and 4.5% in ≥65 year olds) increased with age. Compared to those ≥65 years old, those 18-44 years old had fewer respiratory complaints (10.0% vs. 13.9%), but more reports of headache (3.2% vs. 0.8%) and nausea/vomiting (5.5% vs. 3.2%). Conclusion: In a state-wide population of ED patients with HF diagnoses, sex differences in chief complaint categories that are less obvious symptoms of HF were observed for those 18-44 years old, with women reporting more nausea/vomiting and headache compared to men. Chief complaint categories that are less obvious symptoms of HF were more common among patients 18-44 (nausea/vomiting, headache) and ≥65 (balance issues, confusion, weakness) years old. Characterizing the variation of symptoms of HF patients in the ED may help inform the identification of ED patients with HF and the outpatient management of HF-related symptoms.


JAMIA Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-166
Author(s):  
David Chang ◽  
Woo Suk Hong ◽  
Richard Andrew Taylor

Abstract Objective We learn contextual embeddings for emergency department (ED) chief complaints using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a state-of-the-art language model, to derive a compact and computationally useful representation for free-text chief complaints. Materials and methods Retrospective data on 2.1 million adult and pediatric ED visits was obtained from a large healthcare system covering the period of March 2013 to July 2019. A total of 355 497 (16.4%) visits from 65 737 (8.9%) patients were removed for absence of either a structured or unstructured chief complaint. To ensure adequate training set size, chief complaint labels that comprised less than 0.01%, or 1 in 10 000, of all visits were excluded. The cutoff threshold was incremented on a log scale to create seven datasets of decreasing sparsity. The classification task was to predict the provider-assigned label from the free-text chief complaint using BERT, with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo) as baselines. Performance was measured as the Top-k accuracy from k = 1:5 on a hold-out test set comprising 5% of the samples. The embedding for each free-text chief complaint was extracted as the final 768-dimensional layer of the BERT model and visualized using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). Results The models achieved increasing performance with datasets of decreasing sparsity, with BERT outperforming both LSTM and ELMo. The BERT model yielded Top-1 accuracies of 0.65 and 0.69, Top-3 accuracies of 0.87 and 0.90, and Top-5 accuracies of 0.92 and 0.94 on datasets comprised of 434 and 188 labels, respectively. Visualization using t-SNE mapped the learned embeddings in a clinically meaningful way, with related concepts embedded close to each other and broader types of chief complaints clustered together. Discussion Despite the inherent noise in the chief complaint label space, the model was able to learn a rich representation of chief complaints and generate reasonable predictions of their labels. The learned embeddings accurately predict provider-assigned chief complaint labels and map semantically similar chief complaints to nearby points in vector space. Conclusion Such a model may be used to automatically map free-text chief complaints to structured fields and to assist the development of a standardized, data-driven ontology of chief complaints for healthcare institutions.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrianna Long ◽  
Robert Cambridge ◽  
Melissa Rosa

Return visits to the Emergency Department (ED) are estimated between 2-3.1%, which impacts ED care costs and wait times. Adverse events for unscheduled return visits (URVs) have been reported to be as high as 30%. The objective of this study was to characterize the attitudes and management of Emergency Medicine (EM) physicians regarding patients presenting with the same chief complaint to the ED for an URV. An online survey questionnaire was developed and sent to 160 accredited EM Graduate Medical Education programs in the United States. The questionnaire consisted of case vignettes wherein providers were asked to submit what orders they would place for each scenario. The mean numbers of tests and treatments were compared from initial visit to repeat visit with same chief complaint. Physicians also provided feedback regarding their management of URVs. There were estimated 6988 eligible participants with 397 responses (response rate 5.7%). There was a statistical significance (P&lt;0.001) in provider management of URVs with pediatric fever, but there was no statistical significance for management of the other chief complaints. There were 77% of physicians that felt an increased work up is warranted for URVs. The results of this study indicate that majority of EM residents and staff working in training programs feel that they should approach the management of URV patients with a more extensive workup despite no clinical change. These findings suggest that further analysis should be performed regarding provider management of URVs and the associated healthcare costs.


2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 823-829 ◽  
Author(s):  
NM Nielsen ◽  
M Frisch ◽  
K Rostgaard ◽  
J Wohlfahrt ◽  
H Hjalgrim ◽  
...  

Background Multiple sclerosis (MS) and other autoimmune diseases might cluster. Our aim was to estimate the relative risk (RR) of other autoimmune diseases among MS patients and their first-degree relatives in a population-based cohort study. Methods Using the Danish Multiple Sclerosis Register, the Danish Hospital Discharge Register, and the Danish Civil Registration System, we estimated RRs for 42 different autoimmune diseases in a population-based cohort of 12 403 MS patients and 20 798 of their first-degree relatives. Ratios of observed to expected numbers of autoimmune diseases, based on national sex-, age-, and period-specific incidence rates, served as measures of the RRs. Results Compared with the general population, MS patients were at an increased risk of developing ulcerative colitis (RR = 2.0 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.4–2.8), n = 29) and pemphigoid (RR = 15.4 (CI: 8.7–27.1), n = 12) but at reduced risk of rheumatoid arthritis (RR = 0.5 (CI: 0.4–0.8), n = 28) and temporal arteritis (RR = 0.5 (CI: 0.3–0.97), n = 11). First-degree relatives of MS patients were at increased risks of Crohn’s disease (RR = 1.4 (CI: 1.04–1.9), n = 44), ulcerative colitis (RR = 1.3 (CI: 0.99–1.7), n = 51), Addison’s disease (RR = 3.4 (CI: 1.3–9.0), n = 4), and polyarteritis nodosa (RR = 3.7 (CI: 1.4–10.0), n = 4). Conclusion Patients with MS and their first-degree relatives seem to be at an increased risk of acquiring certain other autoimmune diseases.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Osama Bin Abdullah

Background: Only few prospective studies have evaluated the new quick Sequential (Sepsis-Related) Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) score in emergency department (ED) settings. The aim of this study was to determine the prognostic value of qSOFA compared to systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) in predicting 28-day mortality of infected patients admitted to an ED.   Methods: A prospective observational cohort study of all adult (≥18 years) infected patients admitted to the ED of Slagelse Hospital during 01.10.2017 to 31.03.2018. All patients with suspected or documented infection on arrival to the ED, and treated with antibiotics, were included. Admission variables included in the SIRS- and qSOFA criteria were prospectively obtained from triage forms. Information regarding 28-day mortality was obtained from the Danish Civil Registration System. The diagnostic performance of qSOFA and SIRS score for predicting 28-day mortality was assessed by analyses of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), and area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results: A total of 2,168 patients (47.42% male) were included. A total of 181 (8.35%) met at least two qSOFA criteria, and 1,046 (48.25%) met at least two SIRS criteria on admission. The overall 28-day mortality was 7.47% (95% CI 6.40-8.66%). Unadjusted odds ratio of qSOFA and SIRS for 28-day mortality was 2.93 (95% CI 1.92-4.47) vs 1.27 (95% CI 0.92-1.74), respectively. A qSOFA score of at least two for predicting 28-day mortality had a sensitivity of 19.10% (95% CI 13.40-26.00%), a specificity of 92.50% (95% CI 91.30-93.60%), a PPV and NPV of 17.10% (95% CI 11.90-23.40%) and 93.40% (95% CI 92.20-94.50%), respectively. A SIRS score of at least two for predicting 28-day mortality had a sensitivity of 53.70 (95% CI 45.70-61.60%), a specificity of 52.20% (95% CI 50.00-54.40%), a PPV and NPV of 8.32% (95% CI 6.72-10.20%) and 93.30% (95% CI 91.70-94.70%), respectively. The AUC for qSOFA and SIRS was 0.56 (95% CI 0.53-0.59) vs 0.53 (95% CI 0.49-0.57).   Conclusion: Use of qSOFA had improved specificity, but with poor sensitivity, in predicting in 28-day mortality. qSOFA and SIRS showed similar discrimination potential for mortality.


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