Inpatient-Specific AUC Reduces Clutter in Echocardiography Department

Inpatient-specific AUC reduces clutter in echocardiography department

By modifying the appropriate use criteria (AUC) for transthoracic echocardiograms (TTEs) and educating physicians on which tests should be performed in an inpatient versus outpatient setting, researchers at Bridgeport Hospital in Connecticut reduced their inpatient echo order volume by 11.1 percent and boosted the efficiency of their department.

The educational component of the intervention, which was directed at clinicians who most frequently ordered tests, included outlining three key areas: the “rarely appropriate” reasons for an inpatient TTE, the appropriate indications for STAT requests and portable order studies and the common indications for repeat TTEs.

“We thought our echo department could definitely function a lot more efficiently than it was at that time,” said John-Ross Clarke, MD, an internal medicine resident at Yale New Haven Health and Bridgeport Hospital, who presented his team’s work at the American College of Cardiology’s Cardiovascular Summit in Orlando. “We thought a lot of the reason for the inefficiencies were that a lot of the inpatient echos that were being ordered could be ordered as an outpatient.

“We also found that a lot of the physicians were overutilizing ‘STAT’ requests as well as portable studies and that was taking our sonographers away from being able to perform echos for other inpatient as well as outpatient studies,” Clarke told Cardiovascular Business.

By: Daniel Allar, 2/19/2019. Cardiovascular Business, Cardiovascular Imaging