Researchers at two Houston institutions — Baylor College of Medicine and Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center — have designed electronic triggers that scan patient data and reduce delays in patient follow-up. They showcased their triggers in a recent study.
Many factors — such as primary care workloads, time pressures, information overload and lack of robust test result tracking systems — can lead to delays in evaluating patients who may have cancer.
To combat this problem, researchers developed electronic triggers that scan huge amounts of patient data and flag those whose clinical findings were abnormal and who were at risk for delays in follow-up. Delays in follow-up were defined as 30 days for suspected lung cancer, 60 days for colon cancer and 90 days for prostate cancer.
According to Daniel Murphy, MD, first author on the paper, patients who were seeing clinicians who were notified of potential delays had more timely diagnostic evaluation for both prostate and colon cancer.
"Also, more patients in the intervention part of the study had received diagnostic evaluation by the time we completed our final review," noted Dr. Murphy.
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