Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Apr 11, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 23, 2019 - May 30, 2019
Date Accepted: May 14, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Efficiency of SMS contact on medical safety in outpatient surgery: a retrospective study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Outpatient surgery is one of major challenge for the care offer development. Establishing the communication with the patient before surgery and for the follow-up is part of a successful medical management in outpatient surgery. During this communication with phone call, pre-operatives’ rules are repeated. Short Message Services (SMS) seems an interesting alternative.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of pre and post-operative SMS on medical safety in outpatient surgery.
Methods:
We conducted a retrospective, monocentric, observational study. The design of the study was a before-after schema within the adult ambulatory surgery unit of Rouen University Hospital. During the first phase all the patient were called the day before surgery and postoperative period by one off the nurses of the unit. The patient was reminded the preoperative instructions and time of arrival at the hospital. After surgery, the patient was given post-operative advices and pain was evaluated. After instauration of the SMS platform, on the day before surgery the patient and day +1 and +7 after postoperative period received the same instruction by SMS. The primary endpoint was the rate of conversion to full time hospitalization. The secondary’s end points were, defining the causes of hospitalization (medical, surgical, organizational) and the cost of each systems.
Results:
During a 16 months period we included 4388 patients, 2160 patients before the SMS (7 months) and 2228 patients during the SMS phase (9 months). The use of SMS significantly decreased the rate of conversion to full time hospitalization from 1.20% (n= 26) to 0.36% (n= 8) (p=0,001). Causes of hospitalization were mainly medical (56%), followed by surgical (30%), and organizational (14%). We estimated the cost of the SMS to half off the cost of a phone calls information’s and follow-up.
Conclusions:
This retrospective work suggests that SMS reminder decreases the rate of conversion to full time hospitalization and so could improve the safety of outpatient surgery. SMS also decreases by two the cost of patient information. Clinical Trial: E2019-11, Non-Interventional Research Committee based at Rouen University Hospital, Rouen, France
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