Medical Diagnoses in Operations Other Than War(OOTW): Relationship to DEPMEDSPatient Conditions

摘要

Military medical requirements are based on Deployable Medical Systems (DEPMEDS),a Department of Defense initiative which projects and deploys medical materiel to theaters of operations. An upward trend in operations other than war (OOTW), such as peacekeeping and humanitarian missions, has been fostered by changes in US military strategy and global politics; as a result, medical practitioners may encounter injuries and diseases that differ from those typically seen in combat operations. A set of 5806 outpatient diagnoses, collected from a triservice field hospital in Zagreb, Croatia during a multinational peacekeeping mission, were coded according to the international Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9). They were then mapped to corresponding DEPMEDS patient condition (PC) codes. Diagnoses that did not map to PC codes were examined to determine how to expand DEPMEDS to account for them in the planning process. Approximately 62% of the diagnoses (n=3593) mapped to an existing DEPMEDS PC. Respiratory diseases mapped most often, with only 25 of 1095 occurrences (2.28%) remaining unmatched. The remaining 38% of diagnoses (n=2213) could not be mapped. Injury was the largest category, both in frequency (n=1916) and in number and proportion (n=665, 30.04%) of unmatched cases. Among other classifications, more than 50% of musculoskeletal, circulatory, genitourinary, gastrointestinal, and infectious disorders were unmapped.