Common use of Population Clause in Contracts

Population. Our study included all consecutive patients older than 17 years who were transported to our ED by ambulance and for whom the paramedics made contact with the BH. We excluded patients who died on route, those for whom transportation was aborted and those who did not have a CTAS score assigned by both the BH and an ED nurse. Data collection The BH nurses did not have direct access to patients; they assigned a CTAS score on the basis of transmitted xxxxx xxxxx via the Ortivus terminal and the verbal infor- mation given by paramedics during ambulance trans- portation. For long transport times, triage had to be per- formed within 15 minutes of arrival. On arrival at the hospital, each patient was triaged by the ED nurse who was blinded to the score assigned by the BH nurse. The ED nurse completed the process of triage using the xxxx- dardized procedure with a paper-based decision support system. Of note, the study took place before the 2008 CTAS revision. The triage process was not computerized and the score was assigned by nurses from the clinical information. Once the nurse assigned the triage score, it was entered using either the BH or ED software. A trained research assistant abstracted data from the BH and ED databases into a Microsoft Excel spread- sheet using a standardized form. Abstracted variables included patient characteristics and BH and ED CTAS scores. Data analysis We estimated interrater agreement with quadratic weighted κ statistics along with asymptotic 95% confi- dence intervals (CIs). As described by Xxxxxx,11 we xxxx- gorized κ agreement as very good (0.81–1.00), good (0.61–0.80), moderate (0.41–0.60), fair (0.21–0.40) or poor (< 0.20).