Improving Diagnostic Quality of Anogenital Photodocumentation in Emergency Department Evaluations for Acute Child...

Emergency department evaluations for acute child sexual assault include anogenital photodocumentation as a standard of care, which has implications for accurate clinical care and forensic significance. If photodocumentation quality is suboptimal from a diagnostic standpoint, this may lead to wasted care and resources and place needless burdens on patients and families. Our project aimed to improve the diagnostic quality of anogenital photodocumentation at 2 sites in a pediatric emergency department, increasing it from a baseline of 24% to 50% during a 9-month intervention period.

We surveyed multiple clinical teams to determine drivers of diagnostic quality. Using the Model for Improvement, we implemented multiple interventions (clinical pathway revisions, visual guidance, direct provider feedback, and an improved light source option) in the care process for these patients and measured diagnostic quality using a definition adapted from a validated photograph-scoring system. We used statistical process control charts to track diagnostic quality.

We detected no special-cause variation in the outcome measure of improved diagnostic quality. We detected special-cause variation for the process measure of whether care teams obtained photodocumentation, which increased from 77% to 89%.

Interventions to improve the diagnostic quality of anogenital photodocumentation did not result in improvement; however, there was improvement in the likelihood of care teams obtaining photodocumentation in acute sexual assault evaluations.