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Affiliation
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Department of Neurosurgery, Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China; Shanghai Institute of Head Trauma, Shanghai, China. Electronic address: jiyaojiang@126.com. |
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Abstract
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We thank Xueyan Han and Huixuan Zhou for their interest in our Review and for their invaluable concerns on data collection for traumatic brain injury (TBI) in China. They propose that, to better monitor health-care outcomes for TBI, data from the hospital quality-monitoring system (with a minor change on the standardised format of the front page of inpatient medical records) ought to be used.
However, we deemed the data from the hospital quality-monitoring system insufficient, both spatially and temporally, for our Review, which intended to present a whole picture of the country spanning previous decades. Xueyan and Huixuan mention a very good example of data collection on kidney disease from the hospital quality-monitoring system, which involved over 900 tertiary hospitals. However, patients with kidney disease are admitted in tertiary hospitals, but the majority of patients with TBI are admitted in local hospitals due to the urgency and severity of their presentations. Besides, by the end of 2017, there were 2340 tertiary hospitals and 8422 secondary hospitals which were affiliated with a medium size city, county, or district. Additionally, no data before the year 2013 are available in the hospital quality-monitoring system. The hospital quality monitoring system is therefore, at least for the moment, not a good data source for monitoring TBI.
We noted with interest that Xueyan and Huixuan suggest to amend details (ie, by including the injury severity score) on the front page of inpatient medical records to enhance information collection for TBI. It would actually be more helpful if the hospital quality-monitoring system included the Glasgow coma scale (to show clinical features), cranial CT characteristics (to show imaging features), and intracranial pressure (to show pathophysiological features) for every patient with TBI. In brief, improvement of the front page of inpatient medical records for TBI is necessary for guaranteeing a high quality data source ...
Language: en |