Telephone Consultations with Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery (OHNS) Reduced Emergency Visits and Specialty Consultations in Northern Alberta: A Quality Assurance Study

• Author / Creator

  Tian, Peter George Jaminal

• RAAPID (Referral, Access, Advice, Placement, Information, and Destination) is a 24-hour call center run by Alberta Health Services, Alberta, Canada. RAAPID facilitates urgent telephone consultations between Alberta’s physicians with specialists in tertiary care centers, allowing many patients to be cared for in the community, avoiding emergency department (ED) visits and specialty consultations. This thesis consists of two parts: (1) an environmental scan of telephone consultation programs and (2) a quality assurance study of the extent to which RAAPID calls to Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (OHNS) reduced ED visits and specialty consultations.
  Study 1. The environmental scan used a literature search and a google search to identify programs providing physician-to-physician telephone consultations. The searches yielded 17 publications for inclusion. The programs' characteristics were heterogeneous across a wide range of disciplines. Telephone consultation processes were mostly direct to the specialist or with a few utilizing an intermediary or a paging system, with access varying from several hours a week to 24-7. Only a few studies evaluated reduction of services like ED visits and specialist consultations.
  Study 2. The quality assurance study evaluated the outcomes of telephone consultations to OHNS in 2013-2017. Of 1709 telephone consultations, 51.7% resulted in providing advice to the callers, reducing ED visits. A further 10.5% of calls resulted in a referral to a specialty clinic, increasing the proportion of calls reducing ED visits to 62.3%. The estimated direct costs avoided from ED visits was $156,618.08.
  Conclusion. Telephone consultations facilitate access to specialty consults, allowing for patients to be cared for in the community. The RAAPID program's calls to OHNS have decreased potential visits to the ED or referrals to specialist clinics and their associated costs.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Telephone Consultations
  • Emergency Visits
  • RAAPID

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-z2fb-e648

• License

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