Primary health care research & development
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Prim Health Care Res Dev · Oct 2013
Using timelines to depict patient journeys: a development for research methods and clinical care review.
Graphical displays of investigations are increasingly used in clinical care. Summaries of medical records for research or clinical review purposes can generate unmanageably large amounts of data, which may be helpfully summarised and displayed using timelines. During a prospective study of cancer care in primary care, care timelines were generated in Microsoft Visio, using data collected retrospectively from general practice records. ⋯ Thirteen timelines were created, which proved valuable in summarising and analysing the data concerning the cases studied. Timelines provide a clear, concise way of displaying large amounts of diverse data, although some selectivity is required to facilitate interpretation. Generation of timelines in the software was time consuming: if they could be automatically generated within clinical IT systems, they would enable clinicians to generate useful summaries of care of complex cases, facilitating care reviews.
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Prim Health Care Res Dev · Oct 2013
General Practitioners' coronary risk estimates, decisions to start lipid-lowering treatment, gender and length of clinical experience: their interactions in primary prevention.
We investigated whether the risk estimates of General Practitioners (GPs) and their treatment decisions mutually influence each other and whether factors not related to the patient's risk, such as the gender and length in clinical practice, interact. ⋯ The task of making CHD risk estimates and the task of making decisions whether to start lipid-lowering treatment do not seem to influence each other. The gender of physicians and the length of clinical experience seem to affect treatment decisions. Female GPs and less experienced GPs are more likely to make correct decisions. However, the relatively low response rate to the questionnaires may limit the generalizability of these results.