Thus, it is apparently not the number of platelets per se that exerts the overall disease impact on patients and their family, but rather other factors, such as the restrictions in activity, medication side effects, multiple clinic visits, and venipunctures for laboratory studies.
There are also limitations, including that the results may not be generalizable nationwide: The sample draws from urban populations in two geographic locations only, participants may not be representative because they were willing to participate in an ongoing study that included multiple clinic appointments.
While patients may have had multiple clinic visits during this period, only the latest data point within the study period was used for analysis.
She explained to participants that the goal of the study was to understand the experiences and perceptions of patients with multiple clinic visits.
However, given that screening is universal, health care encounter data are captured electronically, the number of hypothyroidism codes is limited, and hypothyroidism care requires multiple clinic visits for the infant, unidentified cases of hypothyroidism should be rare in this study.
Multiple clinic visits may be required to confirm the diagnosis.
Though typically benign, infection with MCV can result in a protracted condition spanning multiple clinic visits.
Findings from this pilot will inform a larger pragmatic study involving multiple clinics.
The recruitment of participants from multiple clinics is a strength of the study, however the small number of consenting practices is a limitation [ 24]. Biochemical assessment of smoking status such as salivary cotinine is the most accurate method for identifying people who smoke [ 25, 26].
In spite of these limitations, however, the study has a number of strengths, including a large, diverse patient sample drawn from multiple clinics and the use of hierarchical modeling.
