{"doi":"10.1111/acem.15010","title":"Number needed to call in emergency care research: Postenrollment follow‐up data from a multicenter prospective syncope study","abstract":"Emergency care research plays a crucial role in enhancing patient management and outcomes for individuals with acute medical conditions or injuries.1 Effective postenrollment follow-up is essential for assessing intervention effectiveness and determining optimal management approaches.2 Insufficient follow-ups can result in missing data and biases, while excessive attempts may lead to unnecessary resource allocation.2 Despite its significance, minimal research has focused on optimizing follow-up procedures, leading to gaps in understanding the best approaches for obtaining patient follow-up data. Telephone follow-up has emerged as a valuable tool in clinical research, offering high participation rates and precise data collection over multiple time points.3 However, our understanding of telephone follow-up characteristics and processes in clinical research remains limited. A previous study found that the response rate to telephone follow-ups was significantly higher than those with mail and e-mail follow-ups.4 Although the potential advantages of telephone follow-up have been explored, no studies have examined the effectiveness of telephone follow-up in emergency research, either in the United States or elsewhere. This study aims to address this gap by identifying the optimal number of phone surveys required to maximize effectiveness in capturing patient-reported outcomes during telephone follow-up in emergency care research. We conducted a secondary analysis using an NIH-funded, multicenter prospective cohort study, Practical Approaches to Care in Emergency Syncope (PACES, NCT04533425). The study cohort included all patients enrolled in the PACES study between August 2021 and August 2023. The PACES study included enrollment at six sites in the United States. The objective of the study was to externally validate two syncope risk stratification tools, the Canadian Syncope Risk Score and the FAINT score.5, 6 Eligible patients were adults 40 years or older who presented to the emergency department (ED) with syncope or presyncope without a serious ED diagnosis. The study was prepared and reported following the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology guidelines. Ethical approvals were obtained from the institutional review boards at enrolling sites. Patient confidentiality was preserved by using anonymous health information. Enrolling EDs were affiliated with urban, academic medical centers located in the following states: New York, Tennessee, and California. Data from the PACES database included patient demographics, participating sites, and telephone follow-up survey information, including the total call attempts and the day and time the survey attempt was completed. We also assessed each participant's Area Deprivation Index (ADI), a composite measurement of neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage. All telephone follow-up surveys were performed centrally by research staff at the lead site at least 30 days after the index ED visits. Each participant was contacted twice daily for 7–14 days until contact was made or until 14 attempts were made. The telephone survey followed a prepared script (see Supplementary Files for details) and took 5 to 10 min to complete. At the completion of telephone follow-up surveys, participants were given virtual gift cards of $25 via email or text message. The primary outcome was the number of telephone attempts required before participants completed the follow-up surveys (between one and 14). Secondary outcomes included factors associated with participants who did not complete telephone follow-up surveys. All analyses were conducted using STATA MP, version 16 (StataCorp). Categorical variables were reported using frequencies and percentages, and continuous variables were reported using mean with standard deviation (SD) or median with interquartile range (IQR), depending on the data distribution. We reported cumulative incidence ratios with their corresponding 95% confidence ","journal":"Academic Emergency Medicine","year":2024,"id":481287,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9126,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":418563,"name":"Daniel K. Nishijima","orcid":"0000-0003-4952-8212","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1309545,"name":"Nancy Wood","orcid":"0000-0002-2421-691X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1271338,"name":"John DeAngelis","orcid":"0000-0002-4223-2526","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":16594,"name":"Alan B. Storrow","orcid":"0000-0002-2893-808X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":704504,"name":"Jonathan Schimmel","orcid":"0000-0002-6383-8308","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1309898,"name":"Nataly Beltre","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1309899,"name":"Dana Sacco","orcid":null,"position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":331583,"name":"Marc A. Probst","orcid":"0000-0002-1503-7178","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":929703,"name":"Wachira Wongtanasarasin","orcid":"0000-0002-1418-0036","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":10,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:07:06.225103Z","pmid":"39223835","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}