Compliance with the guidelines for acute ankle sprain for physiotherapists is moderate in the Netherlands: an observational study

QuestionWhat is the compliance with guidelines for acute ankle sprain for physiotherapists?DesignSurvey of random sample of physiotherapists.Participants400 physiotherapists working in extramural health care in the Netherlands.Outcome measuresQuestions covered attitude towards guidelines in general, familiarity with the guidelines for acute ankle sprain, compliance with the guidelines, advantages and disadvantages of the guidelines, and factors relating to compliance with the guidelines.ResultsThe majority of the physiotherapists were familiar with the content of the guidelines to some degree and 66% applied it to more than half of their patients with acute ankle sprain. The recommendations to determine both the prognosis and the necessity of treatment by using the function score were the least followed. Some physiotherapists thought the function score was not completely clear, which may have been a barrier for implementation. Factors relating positively to compliance were a positive attitude towards guidelines in general, and having colleagues who implemented the guidelines for acute ankle sprain.ConclusionAlthough compliance with the guidelines for acute ankle sprain was fair/moderate, compliance may be enhanced by improving clarity of the function score, including it in the short version and improving the attitude of physiotherapists towards guidelines in general

Pathology image exchange : The Dutch digital pathology platform for exchange of whole-slide images for efficient teleconsultation, telerevision, and virtual expert panels

Among the many uses of digital pathology, remote consultation, remote revision, and virtual slide panels may be the most important ones. This requires basic slide scanner infrastructure in participating laboratories to produce whole-slide images. More importantly, a software platform is needed for exchange of these images and functionality to support the processes around discussing and reporting on these images without breaching patient privacy. This poses high demands on the setup of such a platform, given the inherent complexity of the handling of digital pathology images. In this article, we describe the setup and validation of the Pathology Image Exchange project, which aimed to create a vendor-independent platform for exchange of whole-slide images between Dutch pathology laboratories to facilitate efficient teleconsultation, telerevision, and virtual slide panels. Pathology Image Exchange was released in April 2018 after technical validation, and a first successful validation in real life has been performed for hematopathology cases