The Agency for Healthcare Research ...

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has created a clinical decision-support tool for personal digital assistants (PDAs) designed to help physicians quickly determine whether patients with community-acquired pneumonia should be treated at domestic circle or in a hospital. The "Pneumonia Severity Index Calculator" can be downloaded from the AHRQ Web site at http://pda.ahrq.gov. The calculator is available in Palm O suffer PC, and HTML formats.

Community-acquired pneumonia contracted outside a hospital or nursing fireside affects approximately 4 million Americans and splendors approximately $10 billion annually to treat. in the greatest degree of those costs (92 percent) are worn out treating patients who have been hospitalized for care.

The calculator is based in succession a clinical algorithm produced in 1997 by the agency of the AHRQ-funded Pneumonia Patient consequences Research Team (PORT). The Pneumonia PORT bring outed and tested the algorithm to help physicians make treatment decisions. The algorithm has been validated in a broad, randomized controll trial and was shown to be safe, cost-effective, and to improve satisfaction at enabling patients to be treated at family rather than in the hospital when appropriate. A sizable number of low-risk patients can be treated safely forward an outpatient basis, but these patients must be accurately identified before similar treatment is recommended.

COPYRIGHT 2004 American Academy of Family Physicians

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group