Original ArticleTelephone follow-up was more expensive but more efficient than postal in a national stroke registry
Section snippets
Costs and efficiency of patient follow-up in the Australian Stroke Clinical Registry: randomized comparison of telephone vs. postal methods
Registries provide the gold-standard method of capturing critical data necessary for assessing variations in practice and care because they encapsulate patient populations with a broad range of characteristics in “real-world” conditions [1]. They also provide an opportunity to assess the uptake of proven treatments [2], [3] and use of hazardous or expensive aspects of health care [4], [5]. Although the patterns of presentation, clinical profile, acute management, and effects of treatment in
Participants
All patients with acute stroke or TIA who were admitted to participating hospitals are identified for inclusion in a national registry, the AuSCR. Stroke or TIA are defined using International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) codes: I63 Cerebral Infarction (I63.0, I63.1, I63.2, I63.3, I63.4, I63.5, I63.6, I63.8, and I63.9); I64 Stroke, not specified as hemorrhage or infarction; I61 intracerebral hemorrhage (I61.0−I61.9); I62 other nontraumatic intracerebral hemorrhage (I62.0, I62.1, and
Results
Table 1 shows that there were no major differences in the baseline characteristics or outcomes of respondents between the randomized follow-up arms. Fig. 1 outlines the flow of patients through the study. There were statistically significant differences between the proportion of respondents who switched from mail to telephone method owing to lack of response (19/282) and from telephone to mail method (50/277; P = 0.0001).
The overall combined primary response rate was 392 of 559 (70.1%). A
Discussion
This study showed that telephone data collection with postal reminder, and postal data collection with telephone reminder, were both effective strategies for collecting medium-term outcome data from participants in a large-scale prospective stroke registry. Although the finding of equivalent response rates for the telephone and postal administration is consistent with previous studies of survey completion [16], this has been demonstrated for the first time specifically within a voluntary,
Acknowledgment
During this study period, the Australian Stroke Clinical Registry was supported by the Australian Commission for Safety and Quality in Health Care (tender 018/0809) and an unrestricted educational grant provided by Allergan Australia.
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