Enhanced Quality and Patient Care

The technology exists today to significantly enhance the quality of care, clinical outcomes and financial performance of one of your most important clinical service lines. It's sitting, most probably not fully utilized, in your own hospital.

Each year there are five million patients presenting to the emergency departments of hospitals across the United States with the chief complaint of chest pain. These patients are subjected to a work up including history and physical exams, EKGs and a variety of blood tests. All of these tests attempt to answer the question "What does this patient's coronary arteries look like at this point in time?" without ever looking at the arteries themselves. Studies from a variety of settings, both teaching hospitals and private practice, indicate that this algorithm results in considerable diagnostic uncertainty resulting in the possibility of (1) unnecessarily long lengths of stay in the emergency departments, (2) potentially deniable inpatient admissions and, most importantly, (3) inappropriate discharges from the emergency department (a source of undesirable outcomes and malpractice exposure). This is a $5B cost problem, nationally.