Research about chief complaint and principal diagnosis of patients who visited the university hospital emergency room

Abstract

As medical treatment is developing with technology, the men's average life expectancy is extended. Therefore, primary medical care becomes emphasized in order to reduce the medical expenses in the long term by satisfying individual's life being healthy. The date for this thesis was collected from January 2011 to June 2011. 889 patients who visited the university hospital emergency room and hospitalized in internal medicine, were picked as the research subjects and they were targeted to be recorded the distribution of chief complaint and principal diagnosis of the patients. Also, this record was used to apply to the standard Classification of Diseases(as known as ICD) and the method of detailed classification of the primary medical care(as known as ICPC) to compare each other. In order to analysis, frequency analysis was used to see vital statistics and the cross tabulations were used to see the distribution of chief complaint according to ICD and ICPC. Results of the research were Abdominal pain(17.7%), Dyspnea(13.5%), Fever (12.5%), and Haematemesis (9.8%), and those symptoms represented the 54.5% of overall chief complaints that is treated in primary care. Therefore, it is acceptable to use the classification of the primary medical care at doc-in-a-box. Also, in case of diagnosis of abdominal pain, it is classified to R10 in ICD and 116 patients(18.7%) belonged to it, but according to ICPC, it is subdivided to Epigastric(11.5%) and General(5.8%). ICPC classification, which is focused to primary medical care is more detailed than ICD classification. Because the data that is collected for this thesis is from only one hospital, it is hard to represent to all the cases, but ICPC in emergency medical care, it has more classification available and it can subdivide the patients effectively, so it is meaningful.