Resident Management of Outpatient Sports & Spine Emergencies: A Quality Improvement Project

Despite studies demonstrating the prevalence of serious spinal pathologies in outpatient setting to be less than 1%, back pain affects 15-20% of the population at any one time and accounted for 4.4% of all emergency department visits between 2000 and 2016. The rise in minimally invasive procedures for treating chronic pain in the outpatient setting consequentially leads to an increase in the amount of post-procedure communication attempts from the patient to provider. Residents of major academic institutions, including our own, are often the physician on call and responsible for answering patient messages or calls with an attending’s guidance. The objectives of this quality improvement project were to increase resident knowledge on adverse outcomes of injections and comfortability in triaging patient concerns into emergent, urgent, and non-urgent via telehealth.