Poster presenter: Lesley Jackson, MD, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Poster title: Development, Refinement, and Validation of an Emergency Department Gout Flare Electronic Medical Record Alert
Poster Session B
8:30 – 10:30 a.m. ET Sunday, Nov. 7
All ACR Convergence 2021 poster presentations are available on demand to registered meeting participants through March 11, 2022.
What is your poster about?
The objective of our study was to refine a multicriteria electronic medical record (EMR) alert to identify patients with a gout flare during an emergency department (ED) visit. The gout flare alert used EMR data from the chief medical complaint or problem list entered by ED nursing staff during patient triage. It could be triggered by one or more criteria, which were based on a combination of the presence of the key term “gout” listed in the chief complaint or problem list in conjunction with a musculoskeletal complaint. Our alert had reasonable sensitivity of 75% and specificity of 82%. This approach may be a useful strategy to identify and potentially recruit participants with acute gout flare for studies.
Why did you decide to investigate this topic?
Many gout patients have inadequate access to primary care services, which creates a gap in care because many patients who visit the ED for acute gout flares do not follow up in the ambulatory setting after their ED visit. This group is an underserved and understudied population that may benefit from quality improvement, or other interventions to improve care. However, a key limitation for including these patients in research is the ability to identify them in real time when they present for an acute gout flare. Thus, this identification is a key first step and one that we addressed in this study.
What are you working on next related to this research?
We recently began enrollment for a randomized clinical trial of a behavioral intervention in people with acute gout flare who present to the ED. We are utilizing this alert to identify potential participants for recruitment in this study.
What excites you most about your work?
My interests include health disparities and examining how social determinants of health contribute to the presence of gout as well as health outcomes in patients with gout. This study will help address a gap in care for vulnerable patients who have been historically underserved by identifying them during an ED encounter, which for some patients is a common clinical entry portal into the healthcare system.