Validation of the Hubli Grading System for Assessing Unilateral and Bilateral Cleft Lip Outcomes.

BACKGROUND: When determining whether a cleft lip repair outcome is acceptable, the severity of a patient's cleft at initial presentation must be considered. Currently, there is not a widely agreed upon scale for grading the pre-operative severity or post-operative surgical outcome for patients with unilateral and/or bilateral cleft lip. The aim of this study is to validate the Hubli grading system as a reliable and reproducible system for characterizing cleft lip repair outcomes. METHODS: Craniofacial surgeon graders independently evaluated 2489 patients from 56 different countries undergoing both unilateral and bilateral cleft lip repair from April 2004 to December 2018. Preoperative severity and postoperative surgical results were assessed, and these grades were combined to determine surgical outcome acceptability based on initial cleft severity. Intrarater and interrater reliability were calculated as percentages of agreement. RESULTS: Intrarater and interrater acceptability scores had an agreement of 94.50% and 87.04%, respectively. These results indicate that using the Hubli grading system, independent raters are able to reliably and reproducibly measure the acceptability of a cleft lip repair. CONCLUSIONS: This study validates the use of the Hubli grading system to evaluate the acceptability of unilateral and bilateral cleft lip repairs. This is the largest study to date to evaluate cleft lip severity and repair outcomes, and the Hubli grading system is the only scale to determine the acceptability of surgical outcomes based on initial cleft severity. This system is designed to identify surgeons with sub-optimal outcomes in order to implement timely, individualized training on a global scale.

Medical Documentation in Low- and Middle-income Countries: Lessons Learned from Implementing Specialized Charting Software.

BACKGROUND: The implementation of electronic health record (EHR) software at healthcare facilities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is limited by financial and technological constraints. Smile Train, the world's largest cleft charity, developed a cleft treatment EHR system, Smile Train Express (STX), and distributed it to their partnered institutions. The purpose of this study was to investigate trends in medical documentation practices amongst Smile Train-partner institutions to characterize the impact that specialized EHR software has on medical documentation practices at healthcare facilities in LMICs. METHODS: Surveys were administered electronically to 843 Smile Train-partnered institutions across 68 LMICs. The survey inquired about institutions' internet connection, documentation methods used during patient encounters, rationale for using said methods, and documentation methods for cloud-based storage of healthcare data. Institutions were grouped by economic and geographic subgroups for analysis. RESULTS: A total of 162 institutions (19.2%) responded to the survey. Most institutions employed paper charting (64.2%) or institutional EHR software (25.9%) for data entry during a patient encounter with the latter's use varying significantly across geographical subgroups (P = 0.01). STX was used by 18 institutions (11.1%) during a patient encounter. Workflow was the most frequently cited reason for institutions to employ their entry method during a patient encounter (51.4%). CONCLUSIONS: The provision of STX to partnered institutions influenced medical documentation practices at several institutions; however, regulations and guidelines have likely limited its complete integration into clinical workflows. Further studies are needed to characterize trends in medical documentation in LMICs at a more granular level.