ArticleJournal of primary care & community health
How GPs can Recognize Persistent Frequent Attenders at Finnish Primary Health Care Using Electronic Patient Records.
Article in Journal of primary care & community health. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Factors Contributing to Persistent Frequent Attendance in Primary Care Among the Oldest Old: Longitudinal Evidence From the AgeCoDe-AgeQualiDe Study.Frontiers in medicine · 2022Article
- Prevalence of Adolescents' Persistent High Utilization of Outpatient Healthcare Services and ICD-10 Diagnoses: A Retrospective 4-Year Population-Based Register Study.Journal of primary care & community healthArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionThe proportion of patients who are frequent attenders (FAs) varies from few percent to almost 30% of all patients. A small group of patients continued to visit GPs year after year. In previous studies, it has been reported that over 15% of all 1-year FAs were persistent frequent attenders (pFAs).
objectivesThis study aimed to identify typical features of pFAs from the textual content in their medical entries, which could help GPs to recognize pFAs easily and facilitated treatment.Methods: A retrospective register study was done, using 10 years of electronic patient records. The data were collected from Finnish primary health care centers and used to analyze chronic symptoms and diagnoses of pFAs and to calculate the inverse document frequency weight (IDF) of words used in the patient records. IDF was used to determine which words, if any, are typical for pFAs. The study group consisted of the 5-year pFAs and control group of 1-year FAs. The main background variables were age, gender, occupation, smoking habits, use of alcohol, and BMI.
resultsOut of 4392 frequent attenders, 6.6% were pFAs for 3 years and 1.1% were pFAs for 5 years. Of the pFAs, 65% were female and 35% were male. The study group had significantly more depressive episodes (
conclusionA typical pFA seems to be a woman, aged about 55 years with depressive episodes, asthma or COPD, and lower back pain. Physicians describe pFAs with ordinary words in patient records. It was not possible to differentiate pFAs from 1-year FAs in this way.
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