Respondents' quotes illustrating the potential of the EGS uniform anatomic severity grading system-based workflow to provide novel opportunities for standardization in care, clinical research, and overall improved patient care
| Theme | Quotation |
| Standardization | ‘The standardization of consult notes is really appealing. Having information that you should always include for common consults, and be able to compare across consults. I think that would be very useful.’ |
| ‘I think that any time appropriate Standardization occurs, then that decreases the potential for human error.’ | |
| ‘If this synoptic note and scoring system is validated, it would be really important to have and to use for institutional transfer. You get these calls from community hospitals and you don't have an idea of how acute the patient is. You try to ask enough questions, but then the patients show up here [in a different condition than expected]. I think this being implemented beyond Stanford in general surgery could be really helpful.’ | |
| Facilitate clinical research | ‘I think it will simplify categorization of patients for research rather than having to sift through dozens of charts later on.’ |
| ‘I would say probably trying to get better data on some of the questions regarding decision making in general surgery. In non-operative management, there are a lot of challenging situations that we make decisions on based on our best judgment and/or discussion with other physicians, but there is little good data to go off. The numbers are small or non-existent. So I think that would be the most useful part.’ | |
| ‘Yes, in terms of the guiding data, it is important to know. Because a lot of the patients are probably managed non-operatively and are being missed as important.’ | |
| ‘I think you would get lots of good data about the consults we're seeing, how acute they are, how much we're operating, and what we're doing. I think it is a good way to collect data and organize it in an area that would be otherwise hard to follow.’ | |
| ‘Where I see value in it is in research. I think it’s similar to organ injury grading for trauma, where at the time of initial evaluation and management, I would say it isn’t particularly useful. I think it is more useful in the backend when it comes to research and classification for studies.’ | |
| Improve care | ‘I think this is happening in different areas of medicine. Cancer is one example where staging is applied formally. I think it allows you to provide better quality care and to interpret other institutions' information.’ |
| ‘This helps us understand our outcomes. I think that’s motivating for everyone, because everyone wants to help take better of patients and be able to have metrics to know that we’re doing that.’ | |
| ‘I think for the first time it will help to really not only classify the types of patients that come to an emergency general surgery service, but it also helps in terms of understanding trends in their care and how we can provide more efficient service to the patients.’ |
EGS, emergency general surgery.