Pediatric Appropriate Evaluation Protocol for India (PAEP-India): Tool for Assessing Appropriateness of Pediatric Hospitalization

To develop and assess Pediatric Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol for India (PAEP-India) for inter-rater reliability and appropriateness of hospitalization. Cross-sectional study. The available PAEP tools were reviewed and adapted for Indian context by ten experienced pediatricians following semi-Delphi process. Two PAEP-India tools; newborn (≤28 days) and children (>28 days-18 years) were developed. These PAEP-India tools were applied to cases to assess appropriateness of admission and inter-rater reliability between assessors. Two sets of case records were used: (i) 274 cases from five medical colleges in Delhi-NCR [≤28 days (n=51); >28 days to 18 years (n=223)]; (ii) 622 infants who were hospitalized in 146 health facilities and were part of a cohort (n= 30688) from two southern Indian states. Each case-record was evaluated by two pediatricians in a blinded manner using the appropriate PAEPIndia tools, and ‘admission criteria’ were categorized as appropriate, inappropriate or indeterminate. The proportion of appropriate hospitalizations and inter-rater reliability between assessors (using kappa statistic) were estimated for the cases. 97.8% hospitalized cases from medical colleges were labelled as appropriate by both reviewers with inter-rater agreement of 98.9% (k=0.66). In the southerm Indian set of infants, both reviewers labelled 80.5% admissions as appropriate with inter-rater agreement of 96.1% (k= 0.89). PAEP-India (newborn and child) tools are simple, objective and applicable in diverse settings and highly reliable. These tools can potentially be used for deciding admission appropriateness and hospital stay and may be evaluated later for usefulness for cost reimbursements for insurance proposes.