Jacqueline Dworaczyk, a student at Arizona State University, worked in the lab of Dr. Andreas Handel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Telemedicine has become increasingly popular during the age\nof Covid-19. During a public health crisis, telemedicine could be used as a\ntool to triage patients and prevent burden on the health care system. In an\nexploratory data analysis, we investigated whether a symptom questionnaire\ncould be used to predict influenza diagnosis. A symptom questionnaire\ncontaining 19 upper respiratory symptoms was administered to patients and\nclinicians (n = 2475 patients) at University of Georgia\u2019s Health Center during\nthe 2016-2017 flu season. Five clinical decision rules were applied to the\nsymptoms reported by the patients and clinicians. The clinical decision rules\u2019 performance\nwhen predicting influenza diagnosis was assessed using AUC, F1, MCC, sensitivity\nand specificity. A 7-11% drop in AUC was observed across all clinical decision\nrules when using the patient-reported symptoms as opposed to the\nclinician-reported symptoms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a sensitivity analysis, we evaluated the clinical\ndecision rules\u2019 ability to predict true, lab-confirmed influenza in a subset of\nour population who received PCR testing. While clinician-reported symptoms\nstill performed better than patient-reported symptoms, the difference in AUCs\nwhen predicting PCR was significantly smaller. These differences in performance\nmay be partially explained by a lack of agreement between patients and\nclinicians on the presence of signs and symptoms. Agreement between the\npatients and clinician\u2019s questionnaire responses (n = 2475) was quantified using\nCohen\u2019s Kappa statistic and found that at best, patient\u2019s and clinician\u2019s had\nmoderate agreement on three of the nineteen symptoms assessed. Overall, it was found that using a patient\nsymptom questionnaire to predict physician diagnosis led to a reduction in\naccuracy. Further studies need to be done to assess the clinical relevance of\nthis reduction. <\/p>\n\n\nDworaczyk<\/a>\n Jacqueline Dworaczyk, a student at Arizona State University, worked in the lab of Dr. Andreas Handel. Telemedicine has become increasingly popular during the age of Covid-19. During a public health crisis, telemedicine could be used as a tool to triage patients and prevent burden on the health care system. In an exploratory data analysis, we<\/p>\n