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Screening after-hours calls may result in medical errors

Physician Practice Advisor, October 25, 2006

Screening after-hours calls to physicians may result in preventable medical errors, suggests a study published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. Answering services often don't forward a patient's call to the on-call physician if the patient says the problem isn't an emergency; researchers attempted to analyze how often serious medical conditions were missed due to this screening method.

Ninety percent of the 2835 after-hours calls researchers examined were forwarded to the physician. Of the 10% that were not forwarded because the patient said the problem was not an emergency

Researchers suggested that patients are not qualified to assess whether or not their problem is an emergency and recommended that physicians reevaluate methods for handling after-hours calls.

Click here to read an abstract of the study.

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