[Proposal of laboratory test panel based on patients' chief complaints in emergency department].
BACKGROUND
A test panel is a group of tests that are simultaneously performed for diagnosis and follow-up of patients. Organ-specific or disease-specific test panels are currently available. Since the patient's chief complaint plays a key role in obtaining the personal and medical history and performing physical examinations, we proposed a test panel based on the chief complaints of the patients.


METHODS
We collected data from 3,127 adults with apparent symptoms who visited the emergency department from April 2009 to May 2009. Subsequently, we classified the patients' chief complaints, ordered the laboratory tests on the basis of these complaints, considered the patients' disease entities, and reviewed the relevant literature.


RESULTS
The patients were categorized into 14 groups on the basis of the most common chief complaints presented in the emergency department. We first selected the basic test panels and then organized the test panel for each chief complaint to enable differential diagnosis.


CONCLUSIONS
We proposed test panels based on the chief complaints of the patients; these test panels could allow rapid diagnosis and be more useful than the organ-specific or disease-specific tests in critical pathway development. The next step will be evaluating the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the test panel that we suggested.
Lee
Hyun Chul
HC
Department of Clinical Pathology, Kyungpook National University School of Medicine, Daegu, Korea.
Kim
Yu Kyung
YK
Song
Jung Hup
JH
Song
Kyung Eun
KE
D019411:Clinical Laboratory Techniques; D003955:Diagnostic Tests, Routine; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D011320:Primary Health Care