2018 Volume 20 Issue 2 Pages 103-110
The usefulness of the regional cooperation clinical pathway for strokes (CPS), when compared to that of conventional medical information letters without CPS (NCPS), has not been studied. We focused on the amounts of information contained in the CPS in Kaga, Ishikawa prefecture (KCPS) and investigated differences between the amounts of information contained in KCPS and in NCPS using quantitative text analysis.
Ten KCPS and ten NCPS documents which accompanied stroke survivors transferred to our convalescent rehabilitation ward between April 2015 and March 2016 were converted into text data, and quantitative text analysis was carried out using the KH Coder. We extracted nouns and coded them according to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). Co-occurrence network analysis using words with a frequency of 5% or greater was conducted and differences in categorization were compared.
No statistically significant differences between NCPS and KCPS were found in patients with regard to the mean age, gender ratio, days of acute hospital stay and functional independence measurement points. The KCPS contained a number of words 1.6 times that of the NCPS and a number of sentences twice that of the NCPS. The ICF classification comparison revealed that the number of words in the KCPS was higher than that in the NCPS in all categories except participation. Cooccurrence network analysis showed that NCPS contained only five categories of words, whereas KCPS contained 17 different categories of words.
The KCPS contains more information than the NCPS. The use of KCPS is recommended for the sharing of information between acute and convalescent rehabilitation hospitals.
