Evaluating the use of a comprehensive pretravel database by travel medicine experts and Novices for advice building

Evaluating the use of a comprehensive pretravel database by travel medicine experts and Novices for advice building

The practice of travel medicine is particularly dependent on knowledge that must be continuously updated, and that can be found in professional electronic documents (PEDs), as specialized websites or comprehensive off-line databases. In this study, we show to what extent the use of a comprehensive p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of travel medicine Vol. 11; no. 3; pp. 148 - 156
Main Authors: CHAUDET, Hervé, PELLEGRIN, Liliane, BOUREAU, Cyril, DELMONT, Jean
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Hamilton, ON Decker 01-05-2004
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Clinical Competence
Communicable Disease Control
Databases, Factual - statistics & numerical data
France - epidemiology
General aspects
Humans
Internet
Medical sciences
Patient Education as Topic
Practice Patterns, Physicians' - statistics & numerical data
Public Health Informatics
Surveys and Questionnaires
Travel
Database
Tropical medicine
Use
Travel medicine
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Summary:The practice of travel medicine is particularly dependent on knowledge that must be continuously updated, and that can be found in professional electronic documents (PEDs), as specialized websites or comprehensive off-line databases. In this study, we show to what extent the use of a comprehensive pretravel database can compensate for a lack of knowledge in travel medicine during advice building, despite inexperience in using such systems. Sixteen physicians, novices and experts in travel medicine, were solicited for building adequate recommendations about real cases of international travel with the help of a specialized PED. The physician's verbalizations, browsing in the documentation and final recommendations have been analyzed for the purpose of identifying and counting the requests addressed to the system and the informative elements in the recommendations. Novices make 2.5 times as many requests for information as experts (p=.0009), and look for a greater variety of information, specifically connected to health precautions (p=.0012), immunizations (p=.0001), health care resources (p=.0037) and climate (p=.019), whereas experts focus their requests mainly on health risks (64.81% of requests, p5.0009). The recommendations from the two groups included equivalent quantities of about 12 pieces of information, but experts used 92.34% of the information found in the documentation, whereas novices used 72.37% (p=.00005). The most used informative elements, whatever the expertise level is, are related to immunizations and health precautions, but experts include more information about health risks (p=0.017), drug characteristics (p=0.014) and chemoprophylaxis (p=0.026). The PED actually increases the novices' travel medicine expertise, and is particularly efficient for immunizations and health precautions. The PED helps a novice to build advice that is, on the whole, equivalent to an expert's in terms of nature, if not of quality. Implications for the benefits of comprehensive PEDs in the practice of travel medicine are discussed.
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ISSN:1195-1982
1708-8305
DOI:10.2310/7060.2004.18564